


I Would I Might Forget That I Am I

by susiecarter



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Extended Universe, Justice League (2017)
Genre: Amnesia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Pining, Post-Canon, Repression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 15:21:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15537138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/susiecarter/pseuds/susiecarter
Summary: Clark Kent woke up, ate breakfast, went to work—the same way he did every day. Ordinary.Except for the part where Superman hadn't been seen in at least a week and nobody knew why, Lois was acting kind of weird, and Bruce Wayne was insisting that Clark was the only reporter he'd allow to run a feature on the crashed alien ship in the park, since Wayne Enterprises had been granted control of the site. And the way Clark felt every time Wayne looked at him a little too long definitely wasn't helping.But it was fine. Clark was normal, there was nothing wrong with him, and everything was fine.





	I Would I Might Forget That I Am I

**Author's Note:**

  * For [justanotherray](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanotherray/gifts).



> I couldn't resist your prompt for Clark forgetting he's Superman, justanotherray, though I ended up going a bit to one side of your suggestion of a disease—mostly for the sake of getting to integrate that "internalized homophobia" optional tag you included. :D I hope very much that you enjoy the results, and that you've had a wonderful DCEU Ex!
> 
> This draws on a little bit of DC comics canon, in the service of handwavery; outside knowledge of the Legion of Super-Heroes won't hurt, but everything you need to know to follow what's going on should be contained within the fic ~~at least if you roll with the exposition, click your heels together, and say, "Shenanigans!" with enthusiasm~~. The internalized homophobia is what I would term mild (slurless and very much self-directed), but a theme throughout.

 

 

_ I would I might forget that I am I _  
_ and break the heavy chain that binds me fast _  
_ whose links about myself my deeds have cast ... _

—[Sonnet VII](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45999/i-would-i-might-forget-that-i-am-i), George Santayana

 

 

Clark woke a little earlier than he'd meant to, eight minutes before his alarm would've gone off. He kept his eyes shut and rolled over, because he wasn't giving up a single one of those eight minutes, and he stayed resolutely limp and didn't think about anything except how comfortable he was until at last the radio came on.

Darn. He grumbled into his pillow and then yawned and stretched, and grudgingly made himself get up.

Bathroom, shower, shave; shirt, slacks, socks. He got a little distracted by the morning news—looked like a nasty accident a couple hours ago on one of the major highways out of Metropolis, big enough that half the Justice League had shown up to help out. In a way, though, it was kind of comforting that there hadn't been anything worse to occupy their attention. Sort of a silver lining. And then he checked the time, and cursed.

He was halfway out the door when he realized he hadn't eaten, and jerked back to grab a frozen waffle he could pin between his teeth. Out the door, lock it, and then on the way down the stairs he could take the waffle in one hand and at least get started gnawing one edge off.

He walked to work, because he always did and he liked to. And today was a perfect day for it: bright and pleasant, blue sky, a few clean white clouds scudding along here and there, doubled and tripled by their own reflections in the shining sides of downtown skyscrapers. The waffle was gone after a few blocks, and, inevitably, by the time he reached the Planet building he was already thinking idly about lunch.

He was only a few minutes late, so Perry wasn't even waiting by his desk to yell at him. He opened up his email first and his calendar second, double-checking to make sure there wasn't anything urgent today that he'd forgotten, and then he jerked when there was a sudden rap of knuckles against the edge of his computer monitor.

"Hey, Smallville," Lois said brightly.

"Hey," Clark returned, a little wary. There was a mismatch there—her tone, the breeziness of it, when she was _watching_ him so steadily—that made him feel like he'd missed something. "Everything okay?"

"Yeah, sure," she said. "You see the news this morning?"

"You mean that big accident up on 7th?" Clark ventured. "Yep. Nice to see the League was on it."

"Yeah, we're lucky the Flash is willing to pop up from Central City so often," Lois said, and then, almost absently, "No sign of Superman, though."

Clark blinked. It had started to turn into kind of a story of its own; nobody'd seen Superman in almost a week, not in Metropolis, not anywhere. Everybody knew about it, especially in the Planet's offices, and people had been throwing around all kinds of theories about why.

But he couldn't think of a reason for Lois to be trying to bring it up specifically with him.

"Nope," he agreed. "The League hasn't made a statement or anything, have they?"

"Not yet." Lois paused and leaned in a little closer over Clark's desk, and she wasn't watching him so much as just meeting his eyes, intent and sincere. "I just hope Superman's all right," she said, more quietly, "and that he'll be back soon."

Clark felt his throat tighten a little. Just because it was so obvious that she meant it—and he'd heard that kind of thing more and more often, that same sentiment, as the week had gone on. Not that it was a surprise, exactly; plenty of people cared about Superman, and always had. But a lot more people seemed willing to _worry_ about him, too, ever since he'd died. And come back, but still. "Yeah," he said aloud, "I hope so, too."

And it was the truth, so he wasn't sure why Lois's eyes were going narrow.

She stared at him like that for a second, and then said, "Clark," and the way she said it made Clark kind of relieved that he could see Perry approaching over her shoulder.

"I, uh, I think we might have to pick this up later, Lo," Clark said, trying to sound sorry about it and mostly succeeding.

And then Perry said, "Kent!" and Lois turned around and saw him and sighed.

"Good morning, Perry," Clark said hopefully.

"It could be worse," Perry agreed, and then slapped a hand against the edge of Clark's desk. "Up, up, no time to waste. You know that feature we wanted to run, on the alien ship?"

"Wayne Enterprises has control of the site now, don't they?" Lois said. "I thought Wayne was being cagey about giving permission."

"He was," Perry said. "But he changed his mind this morning—on one condition." He pointed at Clark. "You."

"Me?"

Clark darted a glance at Lois, as if maybe she'd shifted position while he wasn't looking; but no, Perry was definitely pointing at Clark and not at her. Which made absolutely no sense at all—what the hell did _Bruce Wayne_ want Clark for? How had he even remembered Clark's _name_ , out of all the Planet staff he could have asked for? Never mind having a positive enough opinion of his journalistic capabilities to insist on him in particular.

But Lois didn't look confused. She looked satisfied, smug, and maybe even a little bit relieved.

"You," Perry was saying. "I promised Wayne you'd be in his office within the hour. Don't make a liar out of me, Kent," and he smacked Clark's desk one more time, punctuational, and then nodded to Lois and strode away.

"But I—why me?" Clark said blankly, as if the air Perry had left empty behind him were going to answer. "I don't have a Pulitzer, I've—I've never even gotten a big byline. I'm nobody. Why would Bruce Wayne ever—"

Lois shrugged, blithe and unconcerned, and then patted Clark comfortingly on the shoulder. "Life is full of mysteries, Clark," she said, and smiled at him. "Also, Perry just gave you less than half an hour to get to Wayne's office, so you should probably get moving."

"Oh, crap," Clark said, and scrambled for his notepad.

 

 

 

He managed to catch a cab without too much trouble, and then sat back to catch his breath and check his watch and review everything he knew, everything he could think of that might be the least bit useful.

The crashed alien ship in the park had been there for so long it was almost a fixture. The government research installation had been shut down indefinitely after that mess with Luthor and Doomsday, after the inquiry that had started up to discover how Luthor had gained access to a restricted area in the first place. The whole thing had been cordoned off and secured, and nobody had come near it except the National Guard or whoever who'd been keeping an eye on it.

And then the Justice League had broken into it and used it to bring Superman back to life, and dragged the question of what was going to be done with it back into the public eye. It had hardly taken any time at all for Wayne Enterprises to step into the middle of the whole thing, people who knew what they were talking about discussing the obvious potential gains for science and technology, research done responsibly and with sufficient city oversight, while Bruce Wayne smiled and nodded aimlessly next to them.

Perry had tried to jump on a promise of increased transparency to work out some kind of deal that the Planet could cover the whole effort—run an in-depth feature on the ship, its origins, its connections to Superman, all nine yards. And Wayne, or at least whoever in Wayne's offices was in charge of sorting this stuff out, hadn't been all that interested at first; transparency sounded nice, sure, and Wayne had no problem with publicity, but presumably Wayne Enterprises wanted to go through everything on their own, without the Planet's entire readership looking over their shoulders.

Except apparently Wayne had changed his mind. Because of Clark, and Clark had absolutely no idea why.

The only time he could remember having interacted with Wayne was at that fundraising party of Luthor's, and all they'd done was argue. _Freaks dressed like clowns_ , Wayne had said, and Clark had taken offense on Superman's behalf—just because it hadn't seemed fair, when Superman was a hero. Nothing like the Joker at all, and making the comparison had had Clark's hackles up, and it had all gone downhill from there.

He wouldn't have expected Wayne to remember that night, or the thirty seconds he'd spent getting glared at by some Planet reporter whose opinion he had no reason to care about. And if Wayne _did_ remember it, surely that would only mean he'd rather Clark didn't cover Wayne Enterprises business, rather than the reverse?

"Mister?"

Clark blinked. The cabbie had twisted around and was looking at him between the seats, expression mildly concerned. Because—because they'd stopped, because that building right there had a giant WE logo and Wayne's personal Metropolis office at the top of it, and he was supposed to get out. "Sorry, sorry," he said, and didn't even check the meter, just peeled off something reasonable and then an extra twenty for being a weirdo, and made a break for it before the guy could even try to offer him change.

And Perry hadn't been kidding; Wayne had absolutely been expecting Clark. Almost the second he walked into the lobby, one of the receptionists was looking up and smiling at him attentively, and didn't even ask for his name or identification before she directed him over to the elevator: "Top floor, sir. I'll notify Mr. Wayne that you've arrived."

"Sure," Clark said, "thanks," instead of telling her he'd really rather she didn't. This whole situation was just—weird, and it was already impossible but he still found himself wishing he could sneak up to Wayne's office unnoticed, without anybody _looking_ at him.

But he couldn't. He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, double-checked that at the bare minimum he definitely had a notebook, a pen, and his phone if he needed to record; and then he got on Wayne's enormous shiny elevator and rode it all the way up through Wayne's enormous shiny building, until it finally let him out.

And when it did, Wayne was there.

Clark had been expecting another desk, maybe; another polished, immaculately friendly receptionist. A waiting area, somewhere he'd be seated while Wayne finished off a conference call—or pretended to, because in Clark's experience people like Wayne weren't usually in any hurry to clear their schedules for reporters.

But Wayne was right there, standing in front of the elevator doors when they slid open with a mild musical _ding!_ —hands in the pockets of his slacks, looking bland and relaxed, and he raised his eyebrows and said, "Mr. Kent," with his mouth already slanted in a half-smile. "What a pleasure."

Clark stared at him, and for a second felt almost cornered, or—there was something about the way Wayne was looking at him, that smile, how Clark's heart had kicked up for no reason, that was making Clark want to hit the "close door" button and ride the elevator all the way back down to the lobby.

Except if he did that, he'd have to explain it to Perry, and he couldn't even explain it to himself.

"Mr. Wayne," he managed to say instead, forcing himself to meet Wayne's eyes and pinning a quick perfunctory smile on his own mouth in return. "I hope you won't hold our last meeting against me." He reached out to shake Wayne's hand, and Wayne shook back and kept—kept _watching_ Clark the whole time, intent and unblinking. He was—he didn't let go right away either, took just a few seconds too long, and that was—

Clark swallowed. He knew about Bruce Wayne, had heard the things people said, the rumors about his—tastes. But surely Wayne didn't have any reason to think _Clark_ was—was like that; surely he hadn't asked for Clark so specifically because he was—because he wanted to—

No, that was stupid. Jesus. Wayne was letting go anyway, still smiling, and there wasn't anything inappropriate about him shaking Clark's hand. On the off chance he said anything else, Clark could just stop him right there and lay it out for him, and if he really had had questionable motives for picking Clark Kent to do this feature, then he'd probably send Clark back to Perry and ask for somebody else. No problem.

"No, of course not, Mr. Kent," Wayne was saying. "I'm sure the fault was mine. If you'll just join me in my office," he added, stepping back to gesture invitingly with one hand; and Clark took the cue and picked his stalled-out feet up off the floor. He'd been so distracted he hadn't even stepped out of the elevator. Wayne probably already thought he was an idiot.

Wayne's office was just as nice as the rest of the building, all glass and gleaming chrome and black leather, with a huge silver WE logo set into the dark flecked marble of the floor. The view of Metropolis, the bay, was incredible, and on a day as clear as this Clark could see all the way to Gotham, across the water.

"You must be able to just about see your house from here," he said, without quite meaning to—and Wayne gave him a quick sharp look and stopped smiling.

"Something like that," Wayne said slowly, and instead of rounding the desk to sit down, or offering Clark a seat, he just kept standing there, an arm's length away, like he was waiting for something.

Clark looked at him and then away, around the office, searching for something to compliment that wouldn't sound forced— _the floor in here is really shiny, wow_ was probably not an option.

"Clark," Wayne said quietly, and touched Clark's elbow— _touched Clark's elbow_ , and maybe Clark hadn't been too paranoid about the handshake after all.

Clark jerked away instantly and stepped back out of reach, and tried to remind himself that yelling at Wayne for it would be almost as stupid as—as going along with it, jesus, just for a story? Ridiculous. No way in hell. "Excuse me, Mr. Wayne," he made himself say instead, conversational but not warm, and he turned away and sat down in the lone chair on the near side of Wayne's enormous desk. "If we could start discussing any requirements you have for the Planet regarding what we are and are not permitted to publish—"

"Clark," Wayne said again, moving around—in front of the desk, not behind it; too close, Clark thought, feeling suddenly hyperaware of it. It was like he could hear everything, every brush of the fabric of Wayne's suit against itself, between his arms and his sides, between his thighs—jesus, stop it—and the tiniest scuffs of his shoe soles against that shiny floor, his breathing— "The door's closed."

Red heat filled Clark's face instantly, and he was frozen in the chair, with no idea what to do. _Surely_ Wayne didn't mean that the way it sounded. That was—but what other way was there to mean it? Jesus, Clark hadn't been prepared for this at _all_. "Mr. Wayne, I—I think you must have the wrong idea," he fumbled out, and he made himself look up at Wayne and then stopped short.

Wayne was staring at him, looking undeniably startled. The way he was standing in front of the desk was—Clark would've expected him to lean on it, angle his hips invitingly, or—or at least in a way that would've been inviting if you were—if you wanted to—

The point was, he wasn't. He was holding himself square, well-balanced, with his arms crossed; and he wasn't smiling or anything, hadn't lowered his eyes. Or, Clark thought belatedly, his voice. _The door's closed_ —flat, factual. His gaze was searching Clark's face, and Clark stared back at him blankly through it, and then suddenly Wayne's whole face just—closed, expression wiped abruptly clean.

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean, Mr. Kent," he said, mild and pleasant, "but my apologies if I've made you uncomfortable." He glanced at the corners of the room, and then at Clark, with a raised eyebrow Clark seemed expected to understand—Clark looked at him, bewildered, and then at the office. Maybe Wayne hadn't been hitting on him at all. Maybe Wayne was just nuts.

Again, Wayne stared at him a little too long, brow furrowing, and then appeared to abruptly change tacks.

"No doubt you understand why we've been reluctant to allow personnel who aren't part of the research team or oversight committee on-site," Wayne said after a moment, and Clark let out a breath, relieved, because that at least was a sentence he was pretty sure he understood. "Considering what Luthor, and even the Justice League, were able to accomplish with the technology aboard that ship—we had to make quite a few very serious promises to the city and state government, alongside our contractual obligations, before they'd even think about agreeing to let Wayne Enterprises take nominal control of the vessel and its contents." He paused, and tacked on one of those slanting smiles. "Or at least I'm pretty sure that's how our current city liaison explained it to me, anyway."

And Clark couldn't really argue with that. Obviously the whole reason Wayne Enterprises was even interested in the ship was for its staggering technological capabilities; and that was three-quarters of the reason Perry wanted to cover it, too, to land the Planet an exclusive look at whatever was going to come of it. With that last quarter being how well the Planet tended to do with a good solid Superman story. A chance to get a clearer picture of Superman's origins, the world he'd come from and the way his people had lived? There was a pretty obvious built-in audience for material like that, even if half of it was conjecture.

But nobody wanted some bumbling newspaper reporter walking in there and accidentally setting loose a giant radioactive zombie monster for another round. Even with the Justice League around to take care of it.

"Of course," Clark said. "I assume you'll have some conditions you'd like us to meet."

"You," Wayne said. "Just you," and for a second Clark felt his face heat up before—right, Clark was the one who'd have to meet the conditions, even if it was Perry who had the authority to agree to them. And maybe that was one of them: just Clark.

"No photographer," Clark said, to clarify, and Wayne looked at him in that funny searching way and didn't answer for a long moment.

"Exterior shots would be fine," Wayne allowed at last, glancing away. "Interior—we'll consider it. Perhaps in select areas, contingent on the approval of the research team and our internal press office. I'll have Ms. Mehra put you in touch with them before you leave today."

"Great," Clark said. "Thank you, Mr. Wayne," and he meant it—maybe this wouldn't be a huge disaster after all. Maybe Wayne had just been messing with him, some kind of weird petty followup for that fight they'd had at Luthor's party, and was going to let it go and act normal from here on out.

But Wayne just stared at him again. "Of course," he said—easily, pleasantly, his tone at total odds with that fixed intent look in his eyes; and then he drew in a long slow breath through his nose, and finally moved around behind his desk, away from Clark. Thank God. "In fact, let me call someone up here right now to talk to you—I'm sure they'd like some input, and they'll be more help to you than I will."

He didn't pick up the phone right away, though. He waited, looking at Clark, as though—what? Was he giving Clark a chance to say no? Why?

"Uh, sure," Clark said. "That would be fine?"

It was the only reasonable thing to say; but looking at Wayne's face, watching the dip in his brow and the lines etching themselves into place across the bridge of his nose, the way his mouth went set and flat, Clark felt somehow that it had been the wrong answer.

Or at least Wayne thought it was. But all Clark could think was that it was going to be a lot easier to get through this meeting if it was—if he and Wayne weren't alone in here; if Clark had somewhere else to look.

 

 

 

And, sure enough, Wayne seemed to be content to back off after that. If all that nonsense really had been him getting back at Clark for snapping at him back when, he must have decided he was satisfied with Clark's discomfort. He listened to Clark and the lady from the press office as they hashed out some of the initial details, interjecting now and then with mild comments that more often than not were a little off-topic—but that wasn't so bad, relatively speaking.

The one condition Clark stumbled over was—Wayne wanted to be there. Not just to review all Clark's material before it was published, but to accompany him on all his tours of the ship's interior. "And I'm afraid that's non-negotiable," Wayne added, before Clark could even open his mouth to start looking for wiggle room; and the hard glittering way that Wayne stared at him then made Clark pretty sure he meant it.

Which was fine, Clark told himself. Perry wouldn't mind. Bruce Wayne's name got readers, too, even when he wasn't doing anything particularly scandalous. Clark pushed back where he could on the rest of it, and Perry would probably get after him for not doing it hard enough, but—hell, Wayne Enterprises _was_ kind of doing them a favor. And besides, it might be incomprehensible but it seemed to be true: without Clark, they wouldn't even be getting a shot at this at all. So Perry couldn't yell at him too much for it.

Wayne had lunch brought up for all of them in the early afternoon. Sandwiches, which seemed oddly unpretentious of him; and luckily for Clark, apparently the default option for random reporters who'd been trapped in Wayne's office for the day was turkey and cheddar on rye, and a glass of plain cool lemonade. "Perfect," he said to the assistant who'd brought up the tray, when she asked if that was all right. "It's actually my favorite," he added, half to the room in general, and Wayne gave him a weird sharp glance he couldn't read and then looked away again, quick.

By the time he left, though, he was hardly even thinking about it. The morning felt faraway, inconsequential, next to everything else—all the notes he'd taken, everything Wayne's press office was going to be emailing them with to follow up, and Clark probably should review it all with Perry before the official stuff started to arrive.

And fine, okay, so he was going to be stuck with Wayne a few more times. It didn't have to be a problem. Once Wayne had backed off with the personal space issues, he'd been fine, easy enough to get along with. Inside the ship, they'd have plenty to talk about, and there was no reason to think it would go sideways on them. If Wayne tried anything, it wouldn't work, and Clark would be firm and polite and then come back for the next tour session without making a fuss about it. It would be fine.

When he got back to the Planet, he ran through the major bullet points with Perry, and there was only a little bit of shouting before Perry agreed he hadn't screwed up too badly and let him go home.

He did it gratefully; the sun was still up, though it had dropped low, and the walk felt good. And of course it was always a relief to get back inside his apartment. He got takeout and ate it half over his laptop, doing a little more background research on the ship and on Superman, Black Zero.

It was almost midnight by the time he went to bed, and he didn't lie there in the dark for more than five minutes before he had to get up again, bring the electric fan in from the front room and turn it on for the white noise. If there was one thing he missed about Smallville, it was the quiet; sometimes it seemed so loud in Metropolis that Clark could hardly stand it.

But the fan helped. Clark closed his eyes and focused on it, let the steady soothing sound of it fill up his ears, and fell asleep.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

He dreamed. It was just a dream. It had to be.

He was standing outside his mother's house with Bruce Wayne. Whose hand was on his shoulder; who was smiling at him, lopsided, careful, something around the eyes that was still a little wary.

(Still? Why still? What did that mean?)

"I'd better head back soon," Wayne was saying, the hand briefly tightening and then lifting away. "But I imagine I'll see you around."

"Yeah, of course," Clark heard himself say, and then Wayne nodded and turned away. And Clark should have let him go, but didn't—reached out, quick, with something that was almost desperation, and caught Wayne's arm before Wayne could go more than a stride. "Wait, Bruce—Mr. Wayne—"

Wayne's face did something Clark couldn't quite follow. "Only people I haven't tried to kill call me Mr. Wayne," he said quietly, after a second, and it was clearly supposed to be a joke but wasn't quite.

"Bullshit," Clark said, not unkindly. "There's no way Arthur calls you Mr. Wayne."

And that, at last, made Wayne almost smile—not the precise way he'd been doing it before, carefully calibrated, but accidental. Real.

"You've got me there," he said.

And then he waited there, Clark's hand on his arm, and Clark—didn't say anything. But Wayne kept waiting, patient, expression bland, until at last Clark lowered his eyes and said, "I just—I know you said you needed to get back to Gotham. But I'd—I'd like to talk to you for a few minutes. Not out here."

It made no sense, it was—this had never happened. But in the dream, Clark felt seized by so much _urgency_ , a sinking feeling that Wayne had absolutely no reason to agree at the same moment that he became aware of exactly how desperate he was to figure out where he stood with Wayne, the uncertainty suddenly unbearable—

(What uncertainty? Wayne had argued with Clark once at a party, didn't like or care about him. Except when he asked for Clark, Clark in particular and no one else; except when he held Clark's hand too long, stood too close—close enough that Clark—close enough to make Clark think—

Okay, maybe there was a little uncertainty.)

"Of course," Wayne said, and Clark walked him around to the back of the house, away from Mom and the movers and the handful of other people helping, without ever quite letting go of his arm.

And then they were alone, and Wayne was looking at him again, and Clark still hadn't said anything.

"I just want to explain," he heard himself manage at last. "About the park, and—I didn't know what was happening."

"I understand," Wayne said.

"I shouldn't have thrown you at that car," Clark blurted, and then winced and put a hand over his eyes. "Sorry. I won't do that again."

"I shouldn't have tried to kill you," Wayne said, even and a little dry, and Clark looked at him and saw the corner of his mouth twitch. "I won't do that again, either."

"Right, sure," Clark said. "So—we're even."

"If that's what you're willing to call it," Wayne said after a moment, unexpectedly soft.

And wasn't that a relief to hear, Clark thought in the dream, without knowing why he thought it. He blew out a long slow breath, and shook his head, and then said, "And everybody else, Arthur and Victor, Diana, Barry. They're—you're—going to be a team?"

"Yes," Wayne said. "At least that's the idea," and his tone went a little wry but he was still watching Clark carefully. "We—appreciated your help, in Russia."

Clark swallowed, looking away. What did that mean? It couldn't be anything other than dream-nonsense. It couldn't. But his dream-self was frozen with sudden indecision: had he misunderstood everything? Was Wayne making the rest of them a _we_ , Clark the lone _you_ , on purpose—trying to tell him something no one else had been able to bring themselves to say? That they couldn't be expected to work with somebody who'd attacked them like that, or at least not right away. But he'd been helpful in Russia, he had, so maybe there was still a chance—

"Clark," Wayne said, "we're not asking anything of you, not right away. If you need some time to think about it, that's fine. After everything that's happened—"

"Think about what?" Clark said blankly. "You mean all of you? The League?"

Wayne stared at him. "If you'd like to join us," he started saying, cautious, and Clark laughed without meaning to, harsh.

" _If_ I," he repeated, shaking his head, and then he rubbed a hand across his face and said, "Sorry, sorry," to Wayne, who looked a little wary and a little spooked and a little like he was worried Clark was about to start crying or die again or something. "Sorry, I just—I don't know what else to do. I don't know where I—what I—I'm dead," he said at last, and he half-wished he'd screamed it but he was too tired. "I mean, Clark Kent is. I don't know what's left."

Wayne was just standing there, blinking at him. "That's—Clark, you don't need to worry about that," he said. "It'll be taken care of."

"Taken care of? Bruce, I can't ask you to—"

"You didn't," Wayne said quietly. "You didn't ask; you don't need to."

"No," Clark said. "No, you can't be serious. After everything you've already done for my mother—"

"Clark, it's the least I can do—"

"You said we were even," Clark snapped.

"You said it," Wayne corrected, sharp. "I was provisionally willing to accept the label as you appeared to have defined it." He stopped and pressed his lips together, and then said more evenly, deliberately controlled, "Clark—please. I can help you with this. It won't even be particularly difficult, not for me. Let me handle it for you."

Wayne's voice had gone so soft; too soft, Clark thought, but in the dream he didn't seem to mind having Wayne talk to him like that, standing that close. Wayne reached out, settled his hand on Clark's shoulder, and Clark stayed where he was instead of moving out from under it.

"Okay," Clark said slowly. " _If_ you can come up with something I can do for you."

"Clark—"

"I mean it, Bruce. You brought me back to life, you brought the League together; if it hadn't been for you, Steppenwolf might have been mind-controlling the whole planet by now. And if I'm going to be on a team," Clark added, "I should—I have to be able to contribute. There must be something."

And Wayne's mouth went flat and he sighed through his nose, but he didn't say no. "The League will need headquarters. Somewhere to meet, to discuss our work; somewhere to store materials and intelligence. I—have a place. But it's in some disrepair," and the careful way Wayne said this, the shadow of a grimace sweeping over his face, made Clark abruptly sure that it was something of an understatement. "For the sake of security, I won't be able to bring in outside help. Once you're back in Metropolis, if you'd like to come by, you'd—you'd be welcome."

His voice had dropped low, and—and in the dream, unaccountably, Clark drew in a half-step nearer, even though he and Wayne were already too close. "Are you sure?" Clark said, equally low.

"Of course," Wayne said, unhesitating. And then he paused and looked at Clark, and said carefully, "No matter what happens, Clark, wherever the League is, you'll always have a place there."

And Clark didn't know what that meant or why it mattered—but in the dream hearing it was like a blow. He sucked in a breath and his face twisted, and it should have been strange but Wayne didn't object at all, didn't move away, when Clark swayed in and pressed their foreheads together.

"Thank you," Clark murmured, and Wayne's hand slid up his shoulder and curled, steady, around the nape of his neck.

"You never need to thank me," Wayne said quietly, "and especially not for that," but he didn't let go. And—

And in the dream, this strange inexplicable version of Clark was grateful for it.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Bruce stared down at the results in front of him and half-heartedly willed them to change.

He'd been hoping for an answer. A place to start, an explanation—of course even bugs, some sort of monitoring he hadn't noticed, could only provide a rationale for some of Clark's behavior, not all, but still. It would have been better than nothing.

Though it was, in its way, a silver lining. All the scans and sweeps and inspections he could run on short notice, and he hadn't managed to turn up so much as a single concealed microphone. He'd have been irked to discover something like that had made it into the building without his being aware of it.

But at least then he'd have understood why Clark had refused to break character. When Lois had first gotten in touch with him to let him know she was concerned, he hadn't been sure what to think. He'd assured her that the League would do what they could—Diana, he'd been thinking, would probably be the best choice to take Clark aside and offer him an opportunity to talk.

And then Clark hadn't shown. Not for the League meeting, not for the earthquake they'd been interrupted by, not for the fresh round of debriefings afterward. He hadn't checked in, not that day or the day after—which would have been more than enough to declare a potential emergency situation, in accordance with the League procedures they'd all agreed to, except that Clark was fine. He was still showing up for work at the Planet, just like always; he hadn't missed a day, had answered every time Lois had called him on his phone. He was uninjured, not disoriented, and acting normally in almost every respect.

Almost every respect, except that whenever Lois had tried to use any of the signals the two of them had established for discussing Superman, Clark hadn't reacted.

At that point, multiple explanations had been plausible, and there hadn't been any straightforward way to eliminate any of them. Was Clark being watched, followed? Had he somehow lost his powers, suffered a silent crisis over his usefulness as Superman? It had been difficult to say.

Bruce had attempted to account for all contingencies in his response. If Clark was being monitored, Bruce couldn't get in touch with him or arrange to keep an eye on him except in ways that made sense considering their public personae; he'd dug up Perry White's repeated requests for some kind of feature on the alien ship, newly passed into Wayne Enterprises custody, and requiring that it be done by Clark Kent and Clark Kent only wasn't _entirely_ out of character for Bruce Wayne. He'd met Kent before, after all, and forcing someone who didn't like him to write a fawning series of pieces about Wayne Enterprises's strategic success in landing the ship, on nothing more than an idle whim, was the sort of thing Bruce Wayne might plausibly do.

And in the hallway, of course, he couldn't have said anything. But once they were alone in Bruce's office with the door closed—Clark knew perfectly well exactly how many security measures were in place to prevent anyone outside that office from knowing what was going on inside it. He shouldn't have hesitated to interact with Bruce the way he usually did. And instead—

Instead, he'd acted like Bruce was a stranger. Or, no, not that; not exactly. Like Bruce was no one but Bruce Wayne. He'd referenced their first meeting as civilians without hesitation. But he'd seemed so bewildered by Bruce's insistence on his presence, when if anything Bruce would have expected Clark to be angry. He'd been surprised to be handed his favorite sandwich for lunch. He'd reacted to the kinds of things Bruce always did—touching his hand, his arm; standing close enough to speak quietly—as though they'd been startling, even frightening. As though Bruce had meant something else entirely by them.

Bruce breathed in, out, and forced himself not to dwell on it. The way Clark had stared at him, red-faced, and the clipped, remote way he'd spoken: _Mr. Wayne, I think you must have the wrong idea_ —

Bruce might almost have been tempted to think it was deliberate, Clark delivering a roundabout answer to a question Bruce had been careful not to ask, with an extended head game on the side. Except he knew Clark better than that, these days. Or—he had. He thought he had.

But maybe he'd been wrong.

 

 

 

When he stepped into the briefing room, they were all already waiting for him—the League, Alfred, and Lois Lane, arranged around the table, and all turned and already watching the door, having heard his footsteps.

"Well?" Lois said immediately. "What happened? Did he tell you anything?"

"No," Bruce said, and leaned across the table to set the results in front of Alfred, who scanned them and then dropped back in his chair with a sigh. "I thought perhaps he was attempting to indicate that there were monitoring devices present, detectable to his senses but not to mine. But that doesn't appear to be the case."

"So he was the same," Diana said, frowning.

"Yes. He answered to his name without hesitation; he appeared alert, aware, and made references to specific past experiences. But even in my office, with no one else present or within earshot, he was—" Bruce stopped, suddenly conscious of a sense that it was important to choose his words carefully, to describe what Clark had done in a way that didn't sound—overwrought. "He reacted as though I were a public figure he'd argued with once at a party."

"Well, that's kind of what you are," Barry said, but hesitantly, and he was frowning.

"So you didn't ask," Arthur summarized, leaning back in his chair.

"There wasn't an opportunity," Bruce said, without rancor. "I had to eliminate the possibility that we were in fact being watched."

"But you weren't," Victor said. "So whatever _is_ wrong, that's not it."

Lois sighed through her nose, sharp, and shook her head. "It just doesn't make any sense," she said. "If he wanted a break, wanted to let you all handle things for a little while, there's no reason he wouldn't just _say_ it. But instead he's acting like—"

"Like he's forgotten he's Superman," Alfred said.

Everyone looked at him, and he glanced up calmly from the printouts Bruce had handed him and raised an eyebrow.

"He appears to be continuing to live Clark Kent's life without interruption." Alfred ticked this fact off on one finger. "But Superman has vanished," and that was two. "He ignores or reacts with confusion and bewilderment to attempts to initiate conversations relating to Superman, when in the normal course of events he would have been expected to pick up on certain cues." Three. "The past interaction he referenced with you, sir—he was acting as Clark Kent at the time?"

"Yes," Bruce allowed.

"But all your past history and interactions relating to your roles as Batman and Superman," Alfred murmured, "may as well not have existed?"

Bruce didn't answer; he didn't need to.

"Well, that's—weird," Barry said after a second. "But, I mean, is it really that big a problem? Like, can't you just rope him with that thing you've got," and this last he directed to Diana, "and ask him who he is? Then he'll have to tell the truth, which is that he's Superman."

"I'm not sure it's that simple," Diana said slowly. "If he's truly unaware of his own identity as Superman, failing to disclose that identity is not a lie. He cannot be made to speak truths he does not know. If Victor held the lasso and I asked him the value of pi to fifty places, he would give it, because he knows it. But if I did the same to you—"

"—then I'd say three-point-one-four-one-five-that's-all-I-got," Barry conceded, "because that's the truth."

"And if we held it ourselves," Victor added, "and told him who he was, there's no reason he'd listen, because he doesn't know any of us well enough to trust us and he wouldn't have any reason to believe it. He wouldn't understand why we were doing it. He'd just think we were nuts."

"Wouldn't blame him," Arthur said thoughtfully.

"But has he lost his powers," Alfred mused, "or only the memory of them?"

"Either way," Bruce said, grim, "he's in danger. If he's got them but doesn't know how to use them, they're not going to do him any good—and he might hurt someone by accident, without even understanding what's happening."

"He hasn't broken anything at the Planet," Lois said. "Your office?"

"No," Bruce conceded. And it was a fair point; Clark had made it a lifelong habit, ingrained, to restrain most of his powers to the minimum level required. Some of them still got away from him, mostly the senses. But everything else, he kept on lockdown, without even having to think about it.

But still, the idea of Superman walking around like that, unknowing, blithely ignorant, wasn't a comforting one. It would only take one paid Luthor crony with a chunk of kryptonite—Clark wouldn't know what to do, wouldn't be able to get away, and even if he did he wouldn't have any idea that he could call on the League for help.

"So you're going to let us run the feature after all," Lois said.

Bruce glanced up and met her eyes. She wasn't wrong. He'd planned on a single meeting, just to get Clark into his office to try to pin him down and make him explain himself; then he'd have come up with some ludicrous requirement no reasonable person would meet, and Perry White would turn him down flat, and that would be the end of it. But—

But if they wanted to keep an eye on Clark, that was a great way to do it. Lois could cover him pretty well while he was at the Planet office—depending on where she was, whether she was busy, any new assignments Perry stacked on her plate. But Bruce taking him to the ship, dragging it out, spending day after day showing him around in there—it _was_ secure, these days, and no one would be going in or out without Bruce's knowledge. Short of kidnapping Clark and locking him in the Batcave, it was just about the safest Clark could get while they tried to figure out how this had happened and how to fix it.

"Yes," Bruce said. "I am."

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Clark wasn't sure how to feel about going to meet Wayne again.

He'd almost hoped that he would come into the Planet office and Perry would be waiting for him, ready to tell him he'd actually done a terrible job after all, and Wayne's conditions were unacceptable, and the whole thing had been called off.

But it didn't happen. When Perry did stride up to Clark's desk, it was just to clap him on the shoulder and say he could've done worse. Perry would be ironing things out with the Wayne Enterprises press office for another couple of days, but in the meantime there was no reason why Clark shouldn't go to the park and meet Wayne today.

And Clark smiled up at Perry until it was over, and then put his head down on his desk and made a muffled unhappy noise into the surface of his open day planner.

He didn't even know exactly what it was that was bothering him so much. Or he did, but he didn't want to think about it for too long. He—he just hadn't liked it, that was all. Being around Wayne, the way Wayne had looked at him; Wayne's hand against his, how it had lingered. The moment when Wayne had said his name like that, and _the door is closed_ , and Clark had thought—

Clark pressed his hot face a little harder against the desk, and swallowed down the unpleasant queasy-edged feeling in his chest.

He hadn't liked it. But if he tried to get out of doing this feature by telling Perry that Bruce Wayne was acting weird, Perry was going to laugh him out of the office and then probably move all his deadlines up.

"Hey, Smallville—you okay down there?"

Clark cracked an eye. It was Lois, because of course it was: standing at one side of his desk, arms crossed, and looking down at him with something that was walking the line between sympathy and amusement.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I'm—I'm fine." He levered himself reluctantly up, settling his glasses back into their proper position on his nose, and then looked at her ruefully. "I just wish Mr. Wayne hadn't chosen me to pick on, I guess. Maybe he does remember arguing with me at that fundraiser," he added halfheartedly. "Maybe this is his petty revenge, served cold."

"Surely it won't be _that_ bad," Lois said, a little more gently. "Doesn't seem to me like there's any reason why you and—and Mr. Wayne shouldn't get along just fine."

Clark stared at her. "Right," he said slowly. "Because we've got so much in common."

And for some reason, that made Lois snort and shake her head. "I just think if you give him a chance, all this might work out better than you're expecting." Her tone was carefully diplomatic, but there was still amusement warming up its edges.

Clark wished that made him feel better than it did. "Yeah," he said, rote, and tried to make himself smile.

It probably didn't work, judging by the way Lois's face softened. "Hey," she said, and reached out to put a hand over Clark's. "You'll be all right. You're stronger than you think you are, Clark Kent."

There was something about that part that sounded funny, Clark thought; the emphasis, maybe, the way Lois had said his whole name so precisely.

But it was a nice thing to hear, and nice of her to say it. "Thanks, Lo," he said, and she smiled and squeezed his hand before she turned and walked away.

 

 

 

Wayne was already at the park when Clark arrived, waiting outside the ship. He looked comfortable, casual, like they were back at his office and not standing next to the largest extant functioning piece of extraterrestrial technology in the world. Since Wayne Enterprises had been permitted to take control of the site, a new perimeter had been established, the immediate area neatened up and the ship carefully cordoned off, and they had to push their way through clean sheets of plastic, have their IDs checked and be issued small shiny passes, before they could actually get inside.

Clark went first, and was expecting Wayne to just breeze through without pausing; but Wayne performed all the same steps, was handed his credentials with the same polite smile, as if he weren't paying the salaries of all the personnel in here.

And he didn't do anything but raise an eyebrow, when Clark asked about it. "Standard procedure," he said. "After Luthor's little display of questionable judgment, we're required to abide by much more stringent security protocols."

"Well, sure," Clark said, "but—"

He stopped. _But I didn't think you were actually going to do it_ wasn't exactly the most diplomatic thing to tell Wayne to his face. Clark probably shouldn't say it.

But the way the corner of Wayne's mouth tugged upward after a moment looked like he might have heard it anyway.

"We believe this may have served as the main deck," Wayne said smoothly, as though Clark hadn't almost insulted him at all, and he gestured for Clark to precede him further into the ship.

And Clark hadn't had any idea what to expect, but the ship was—the ship was beautiful. Wayne was as thorough as Clark could possibly have asked for; he knew a surprising amount about the ship's structure, its main systems and their functions, how its database was organized. Especially considering Wayne Enterprises had only had access to it for a few weeks now.

But Clark was just lucky Wayne had agreed to allow him to record it all, because he was barely hearing one word out of every ten. He was pretty sure that at some point before they'd come in, he had promised not to touch anything without authorization. But he kept catching himself trailing his hands along the walls, their cool smooth surfaces. They were metallic, but—but almost responsive, seeming to give just a little bit under his touch, welcoming.

"Mr. Kent. Mr. Kent?"

"What?" Clark said blankly, and then then blinked and turned. "Oh, I—sorry, Mr. Wayne. I probably shouldn't be, um—"

"It's fine," Wayne said quietly, and Clark was pretty sure that was a huge lie but he wasn't exactly going to call Wayne on it. "I think perhaps I'm—distracted, at times, by the scientific implications, the potential technological advancements. I don't always see the ship itself."

"It's beautiful," Clark blurted. "It's—it's amazing." He looked up, following the curve of the wall overhead, and pressed his spread hand against that strange forgiving metal. "Just thinking about how it got here, how far it had to come to reach Earth at all, and everything it took for us to discover it, for it to get here. Not that Black Zero was worth it," he added hurriedly, pushing his glasses up his nose. "But it happened, and—and the least we can do is learn from it. And whatever can be discovered here, if it can help people, if some good can come of all that—" He stopped, suddenly sure he was saying this all wrong.

But Wayne was watching him, steady and quiet, eyes intent.

"It's important, Mr. Wayne," Clark said at last. "What you're doing here. It's important, and I want you to know I understand that."

"I never doubted it for a moment," Wayne said softly.

Clark blinked, and frowned at him. That didn't make any sense. Wayne barely knew him; how much of an opinion could he really have on Clark's understanding, or lack of it?

Wayne was still looking at him—almost absently, not quite at _him_ so much as simply following the lines of his face, his hair, his tie. And then all at once he was seeing Clark again, and he cleared his throat and looked away, and then said, "I was in Metropolis on Black Zero. I'm afraid I wasn't—quite as charitable toward alien things on Earth as you are, Mr. Kent, for a while there. But you're right. It's amazing, and the opportunity to interact with it this way is once-in-a-lifetime. More than any of us could earn, or deserve."

Which was also kind of weird. "I'm not sure that's how I'd put it, Mr. Wayne," Clark said slowly.

And Wayne smiled at him, just the barest slant of his mouth. "No," he agreed. "I suppose you wouldn't."

Wayne had been fine, this time. He'd hardly touched Clark at all, hadn't put a hand on Clark's shoulder or stood too close, or—or anything. Even now, he was just there, hands in the pockets of his suit jacket. But looking at him, Clark felt suddenly tense, full of that queasy crawling feeling; he couldn't look at Wayne anymore, dragging his gaze away and swallowing hard, and it was too hot. It was too hot in here.

"At least if I'm willing to take your word for it," Wayne added absently, after a moment. "Should I, Mr. Kent?"

"What?"

"Well," Wayne said, and shrugged. "I don't actually know you all that well, do I? Aside from having so memorably become acquainted with the strength of your opinions regarding Superman, of course. We'll be spending at least a few days together, Mr. Kent. Tell me about yourself."

"Uh. I'm—from Kansas?" Clark said uncertainly.

Wayne raised an inquiring eyebrow, and waited.

"I—we're not here to talk about me," Clark tried.

"Twenty questions," Wayne said, bargaining. "There's a chamber we believe to be related to energy processing at the end of the corridor. You take a look around, ask twenty questions, and then tell me something else."

"Twenty to one?" Clark repeated. "That ratio isn't really in your favor, Mr. Wayne."

And Wayne grinned at him, lopsided. "Are you complaining?"

Clark wasn't, he decided. Wayne duly led him down the corridor, walked him into the chamber, and somehow they slid sideways into a discussion of the answers to what had almost certainly been more than twenty questions—but it was hardly Clark's fault, when there was so much to look at.

"There's still quite a bit of damage, of course," Wayne was saying. "From Black Zero, and from Doomsday tearing his way out. We'll have to do a little renovating."

And then Wayne went quiet, and Clark glanced at his expectant face and bit his lip and said, "My dad is dead. Years ago, it was—I'd just graduated from high school."

It was a stupid thing to say, especially like that; that wasn't the kind of stuff Wayne wanted to know. That wasn't the kind of stuff anybody wanted to know.

But Wayne just said, "I'm sorry. Thank you for telling me."

And—right, Clark thought. Wayne never had to tell anybody, did he? Everybody knew about his parents, what had happened to them. He never got the chance to say it, to have anyone _not_ know until he chose to tell them. Was that better, or worse?

"Yeah," Clark said, inane. "Of—of course."

Wayne did touch Clark then, just for a moment, fingertips light against Clark's elbow; and Clark tried not to jerk away from it and mostly succeeded. It made him feel so strange, self-conscious and too aware of his own body, of Wayne's, of the distance between them. He wished Wayne would cut it out.

"My mom is still alive, though," he said instead, and then found himself hesitating. He didn't know why, it wasn't anything that wasn't public knowledge, but— "Your mother's name was Martha, right?"

"Yes," Wayne said, very quietly.

"Mine, too," Clark said; and there was no way Wayne could have known it, but he didn't look surprised at all.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

It must have been Wayne's fault. That casual line about renovating, that they had talked about his family. That must have been why Clark dreamed again, that night.

Because it wasn't about Mom's house, this time. He was somewhere else, a big stately old building looming over him; and in the dream somehow he knew it was Wayne's, that it had belonged to Wayne's family, that it meant something.

He was—he was just drifting along, at first. There were people he knew, except they were strangers. Faces he'd seen on the news, on the internet. But dreams worked that way sometimes, didn't they? You dreamed about a friend, and then woke up and realized they hadn't looked like themselves at all; you dreamed about your own house, except the floorplan was completely different. You just couldn't tell while you were dreaming, that was all.

So somehow it wasn't weird, in the dream, that the Justice League had names and he knew them. He watched Arthur and Diana armwrestle, elbows propped on a chunk of stone meant to shore up the foundation. Victor was standing over them, refereeing, telling them in a dry voice that if they wanted to _wrestle_ -wrestle they were going to have to do it further away from the house, because all the exterior walls that needed knocking down had already been taken care of. And of course Barry was watching, eating something crispy and bright orange out of a shiny crinkly bag, and musing aloud to himself about pounds per square inch, torque, vectors, that there had to be some kind of word problem here. _If Wonder Woman and Aquaman are armwrestling on a train going sixty miles per hour_ —

It was good to see them like this, thought the Clark in the dream. Even Bruce, leaning over blueprints and apparently ignoring them all, had indefinably relaxed, almost all the tension he usually carried in his shoulders eased away. It was nice.

Honestly, it had sounded ridiculous to Clark when Lois had first filled him in, standing in a cornfield with the white-hot jolt of the mother box's energy still fizzing under his skin. A team? A team led by _Bruce_ , who had to be about the least team-playingest person Clark had ever met in his life. But if they needed his help, then they'd get it; and they had to be desperate, the dream-Clark remembered thinking, if Bruce had been driven to the point of bringing Clark back.

(Back from what? Clark had no idea. But dreams didn't make sense, so it didn't matter.)

So he'd gone, and he'd helped them. And they had been a team after all. Even then, they'd been working together, helping each other; learning even as they did it, facing off against Steppenwolf, to watch each other's backs.

And then Clark had blown in there like Earth's own cheat code, and had made it possible for them to do what they'd been there to do. It was just—

It was just he wasn't one of them. Not exactly. Bruce had brought them together while he was gone, they were—they'd already started getting to know each other, working out how they fit together. They'd been glad to see Clark. They'd been kind to him. But they were past being careful with each other, and didn't know him well enough to have stopped being careful with him, and it made a difference.

In the dream he smiled, watching them, even as the weight of that difference pressed down on him. And when he couldn't carry it anymore, he turned and walked away—not far. Just around the house. Just so he could set it all down for a minute and rest, before he had to pick it back up again.

Except Wayne followed him.

He didn't notice right away. He leaned against the house and tipped his head back against the wall, looked up at the sky and told himself to stop being stupid. And then motion caught his eye, and he glanced over, and it was Wayne.

And for once the Clark in the dream reacted in a way that made sense, bright hot irritation blazing up all at once. "What?" he snapped.

Wayne looked at him, expression mild. "Anything wrong?"

"If there were, why would I tell you?" Clark muttered, and then grimaced and rubbed a hand across his face. Jesus, he shouldn't have said it like that; as if Wayne hadn't done more than enough to make amends for his mistakes, as if Clark still didn't trust him. "I—sorry. Sorry, that wasn't fair."

"It's all right," Wayne said evenly, but Clark was already shaking his head.

"No, Bruce, it isn't. I shouldn't have said that. If there's anybody I'd tell, it's you," and he hadn't realized how true it was until he heard himself say it. It shouldn't have been easier with Wayne, but was: because Barry looked at Clark like he was carrying a twenty-story building all the time, and Diana looked at Clark like she was remembering how he'd died

(—what? What the hell kind of dream _was_ this, anyway—)

and even Arthur, Victor, were sort of cautiously respectful in a way that made Clark feel like he needed to deserve it. But Wayne—

He'd thrown Wayne through walls, punched him until metal had given way under Clark's knuckles; he'd been petty and judgmental and insulting. Wayne knew he wasn't perfect, and that meant it was okay not to be, as long as Wayne was the only one looking.

"I'm just—I—" Clark bit his lip and shook his head again, scrubbing a hand through his hair. "I feel like I don't know what I'm doing here sometimes. Like I was dead for a little too long, and everything figured out how to work around the gap, and now I don't fit the way I used to. That there's—there's not room for me anymore." And jesus, out loud it sounded so selfish, so whiny. Most people died and stayed that way. Most people didn't get a second chance. And Clark was standing here complaining about his? "Sorry, never mind," he said quickly, trying to salvage it with a smile. "I'm in a weird mood today, that's all. It's fine. Not your problem."

Wayne didn't move. He watched Clark quietly for a long moment, and then he said, "Yes, it is."

"Bruce—"

"I told you," Wayne said over him, "you always have a place with the League. If we're going to function effectively as a team—" He shrugged, deliberately light. "Your problems are my problems. I'm pretty sure that's the point."

His tone was mild; it didn't seem to be hard for him to say. But for the Clark in the dream, it was somehow hard to hear. Clark shook his head and clenched his hands into fists, feeling unsteady, shaky—and he couldn't let himself damage the wall behind him. He swallowed once, twice, but couldn't figure out what to say in reply.

And after another few seconds, Wayne moved closer. Close enough to touch the back of Clark's nearer fist carefully, just the barest brush of his fingertips. "I hear these things are less of a burden," Wayne added quietly, "if you share them."

"Yeah?" Clark said, hoarse.

Wayne angled a lopsided little smile at him, gaze steady. "So I'm told. I haven't had a lot of practice with that part myself."

The Clark in the dream knew this for a wild understatement, and huffed half a laugh through his nose. "Yeah," he said, inane, and—

And suddenly he was pierced with a sharp yearning, stealing all the air from his chest. Looking at Wayne, standing there in front of him, he—he wanted to open his hand, turn it and catch Wayne's in it; he wanted to tell Wayne _everything_ , he wanted Wayne to tell _him_ everything, he wanted Wayne to stay here with him and tell him he was going to be okay. He—

He maybe had a whole new problem. The realization washed over the Clark in the dream slowly, a tide inexorably rising, and he swallowed hard and stared at Wayne and thought: shit.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Bruce didn't call another meeting. It wasn't necessary; he didn't have any genuinely substantial updates to provide, after all. He was no closer to understanding what might have happened or why.

He sent out a quick communication to the League, a separate e-mail to Lois, to confirm that Clark had arrived at the ship safe and sound, that his status appeared unchanged and the day had passed without incident. He watched their acknowledgments arrive one after another, various shades of relieved and cautiously optimistic, Victor pointing out that if Clark didn't seem to be struggling to maintain Clark Kent's persona then at least the amnesia wasn't progressive.

Which Bruce had to acknowledge appeared to be true. At least that was something.

He shook his head, rubbed his eyes and then pinched the bridge of his nose. He had research to do; if they were going to fix this, they needed to identify a cause, or at least whatever mechanism was at work behind it. And he should prepare contingency plans, too. If it should prove irreversible—they needed a strategy for making an approach, explaining to Clark who he had been and what he could do. Perhaps with Lois's help, and Martha Kent's. Even if Clark never remembered anything, he knew them. He'd probably believe them over a group of strangers, even strangers he was aware of in their public positions as the Justice League.

Bruce needed to stay focused. That was all there was to it.

But—god. God, it had been so _strange_. Clark Kent in his glasses, his tie, sleeves casually rolled up, broad strong hands smoothing with such careful awe along the walls of the ship. Familiar, in so many respects, until he wasn't: until he looked at Bruce so hesitantly, told Bruce things Bruce already knew as if they were secrets, as if they were brand new.

Except that in a way, they were. Bruce had been so focused on Superman, to the exclusion of—of everything else, obsessed, blinkered, unable to look away. He'd barely even registered meeting Clark Kent, except for the brief sharp spike of frustration that some wet-behind-the-ears reporter would have the nerve to take him to task for treating Superman like the threat he was. They'd spoken to each other for thirty seconds, forty.

And half of the things Bruce knew about Clark Kent weren't anything Clark had ever told him. Things Lois had shouted at Bruce, had told him in a cold quiet voice the first four or five times he'd tried to contact her afterward; things he'd read off gravestones in Kansas. Things he'd learned while accessing Martha Kent's records, researching Smallville Savings & Loan, visiting its offices personally to jam the Wayne Enterprises purchase through with a smile on such short notice.

Things he'd been utterly blindsided by, when it turned out all it would have taken was a few hours talking to Clark to hear them from Clark himself. He'd been thoroughly prepared for Superman in every possible respect; he'd made absolutely certain of it. But Clark Kent, he hadn't been expecting. And it was Clark Kent, in a sense, who'd managed to take him apart in the end—who'd landed the blow that had knocked him flat, without even touching him.

And then Clark had come back, and Bruce had been given the unexpected opportunity to learn him in an entirely different way. Not the studied attention Bruce gave an enemy, assessing their strengths and potential weak points, assembling a tiered selection of tactics to deploy; not the casual bullet-pointed calculations done by Bruce Wayne, determining which degree of drunken leer would provoke the greatest disgust—or the most positive response, depending on the outcome he required.

In truth, he hadn't been sure how to proceed. But it had become clear to him relatively quickly that Clark hadn't been sure either; that this scenario, being known as both versions of themselves and knowing both versions of others, had been new and unfamiliar to them both. And it had become clear to him, too, that between Clark Kent and Superman, it was perhaps Clark Kent who was the more extraordinary.

Clark's sacrifice—because in retrospect that had been Clark at least as much as it had been Superman, Clark who loved humanity in the heights of its beauty and the depths of its ugliness, enough to kill for it and be killed. Clark's openness with Bruce, unexpected and certainly undeserved; Clark's forgiveness, so readily and thoughtlessly extended that he had come to Russia without even being asked, had fallen into perfect step with Bruce and with the team, had smiled at Bruce and held out half a dozen cautious olive branches. In their own way, compared to superstrength or speed, laser eyes, these things were by far the more miraculous.

But Bruce had also started to understand that Superman himself was one of those things. A manifestation of Clark's generosity, Clark's desire to make sure there was someone there to help people who needed it.

Now, in a sense, Clark was almost _less_ himself, a little bit a stranger, without it.

Or was that just wishful thinking? Bruce squeezed his eyes shut. Did he really understand Clark well enough to be sure of that? Or was he telling himself as much because—

Because some part of him wanted to be allowed to believe that Clark was inevitably less himself when he couldn't remember Bruce?

He'd decided they'd need a contingency plan, to tell Clark about Superman if Clark proved unable to remember on his own. But was that fair? It felt almost like setting a trap, laying a pit full of spikes and then pointing Clark at it. With a blindfold on. Because a Clark who knew he had superpowers, who understood what he was capable of, was a Clark who would use that to save people—who couldn't do anything but.

And it wasn't difficult to imagine that Clark had to be happier this way. Who wouldn't be? Who would _want_ to remember being forced to snap a man's neck, or else watch innocent people die? Who would want to remember being pinned to the ground and nearly having their throat cut—impaling themselves, in agony—being buried, or coming back?

This was a Clark Kent who had never been forced to suffer the consequences of Bruce's mistakes. Perhaps it wasn't so wrong after all, that he should be permitted to forget them—that he should be set free, and Bruce should not. Perhaps that wasn't something that needed fixing; perhaps it was only justice.

Bruce sighed, and then shook himself and forced his mind to clear, and leaned forward in his chair. Research first. And this continued charade, Clark and the Daily Planet feature, would give Bruce the opportunity to take Clark deeper into the ship. Maybe it could run scans, perform some kind of evaluation. For all Bruce knew, this was a Kryptonian illness that commonly struck at this developmental stage—or even a developmental stage itself, Clark's alien brain taking parts of itself temporarily offline in order to advance its capabilities or restructure. Renovations, Bruce thought, and almost laughed, even though it was a thoroughly inappropriate response.

Perhaps this might still pass on its own, and there would be no decision to make. It felt like cowardice to hope so, but that was hardly a surprise. Bruce was already well acquainted with his own weaknesses.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

"Starting without me, Mr. Kent?"

Clark ducked his head guiltily and turned around.

He probably should have waited for Wayne outside the ship. That would have been the polite thing to do. Or he shouldn't have come at all, should have called in sick to give himself a day away from Wayne and get his head on straight; that would have been the _smart_ thing to do.

But he hadn't wanted to. He'd slept badly, restless, shreds of that single long strange dream still clinging to the edges of his mind. But once he'd stepped out into the sunlight of another pleasant day in Metropolis, it hadn't seemed to matter all that much. And he'd found himself almost eager to see the ship again, walking faster than he needed to, hurrying to the park without hesitating.

It was interesting, yeah. Clark had already known, in the abstract, why Wayne Enterprises had been willing to spend so long badgering the city about it, negotiating one step at a time to land themselves access. It was a no-brainer: a whole heap of advanced alien technology, the universe's unearned gift to any halfway competent R&D department. But seeing it for himself was—just walking around in here with Wayne, Wayne showing him the way the walls could melt and reform, the brilliant glittering streams of light that had been coursing through that energy processing chamber. It was amazing, fascinating. That should have been more than enough.

But there was something else about being in here that Clark liked, even if he couldn't have said why. Maybe the sense of discovery, of so much sitting here just waiting to be known and understood. Maybe the weird affection he'd started to feel for the ship itself, lying here on an alien world alone. Or the way it just—

It just felt like it _liked_ him. Which was ridiculous, and also there was no way he could say that to Wayne.

"Good morning, Mr. Wayne," he said instead, which was much safer, rubbing sheepishly at the back of his neck. "I, um. I thought I might as well wait for you inside."

"Your initiative is commendable, Mr. Kent," Wayne murmured, and he was _watching_ Clark again, in that soft steady way that made Clark want to look just about anywhere else. "Shall we venture a little further afield today?"

"Further afield?" Clark repeated blankly, and Wayne grinned at him, sudden and slanting, before turning to walk down the corridor; Clark tugged absently at his tie, his collar, dimly aware of a tightness making itself known at the base of his throat, and followed.

And Wayne glanced back past Clark, as if checking to see whether the security personnel they'd left behind all the way back at the entrance might somehow have come up behind them, before—before pulling aside some more of the opaque plastic that was intended to block off areas that weren't supposed to be accessed by anybody but the WE research team.

"Uh, Mr. Wayne, I don't think we're supposed to—"

"Oh, where's that initiative disappeared to, Mr. Kent?" and jesus, did he have to say Clark's name like that? Clark swallowed and dug his nails into his palms, just for a second, just to make himself stop thinking about it.

"If anyone realizes we're here," he made himself say, "I'm throwing you under the bus and pretending I had no idea this was a restricted area."

"Oh, I think I can safely assure you that Wayne Enterprises won't press charges," Wayne said brightly, and ushered Clark through with a wave of his hand.

To Clark's surprise, the ship didn't look all that different on the other side. He supposed he'd been expecting the interior lights to be lowered, a lot of blank closed-off walls instead of doorways or chambers, as if it had been shut down and locked up like a building. But of course the ship had its own control systems, and Wayne had already explained that the researchers were taking things slow, observational, not issuing instructions or pushing buttons until they felt they could be reasonably sure of the results. "We're trying not to break it any worse," Wayne had put it, the corner of his mouth tucked up wryly.

Not that Clark had been looking at his mouth.

Anyway, Clark stepped through, and if anything was different it was something about the air—a stillness, an attentiveness. Like now that they were walking where no one else had gone, the ship wasn't just idly looking after them but watching, with bated breath.

"Here," Wayne said, stepping through after him. "This way. I call it the viewing room—I think you'll like it."

Clark raised an eyebrow. "So this isn't your first trip out of bounds, Mr. Wayne?"

Wayne smiled, and—and moved closer; just stepping clear of the plastic, and it was stupid that that made Clark's heart pound. As if Wayne were going to attack him or something, just because Wayne was a little inappropriate sometimes? Get a grip, Clark told himself. "No," Wayne was saying, "no, I'm afraid I've made something of a habit of crossing lines, Mr. Kent."

And if Clark had had any sense, he'd have demurred right then, turned around and made Wayne take him somewhere else, somewhere authorized. But instead he made himself look at Wayne and raise his eyebrows, and heard himself say, "Well, lay on."

 

 

 

Wherever the viewing room was, Wayne seemed well acquainted with it, because as far as Clark could tell he knew exactly where he was going, moving along the great arched corridors of the ship without hesitation.

"Half of what we do know about the ship's systems," he said as he went, "we've learned because it told us."

Clark blinked. "You've been able to translate its database?"

"Not exactly," Wayne said, and then angled a glance up at the ceiling. "Ship, say hello."

"Hello," the ceiling said obediently, and Clark jerked and almost tripped over his own feet, startled halfway out of his shoes. "Your request to maintain silence except when directly addressed remains in effect."

"Great, thanks," Wayne said to it easily, unconcerned, and then murmured to Clark, "It was doing its best to be helpful, but the research team was finding it a little distracting."

"Is that so," Clark said.

Wayne grinned at him, blithely ignoring the flatness of his tone, and rocked his weight onto the balls of his feet for a second in a little bounce. "Yeah, hard to imagine," he said, mild.

And then his face changed, smoothing out, sober.

"A system like this does have its flaws, of course," he added, more quietly, and glanced abruptly away from Clark's curious look. "This ship wasn't designed to be a—a radioactive alien monster factory, Mr. Kent. Luthor shouldn't have been able to do what he did. We think the crash damaged a lot of systems, including some of the more advanced regulatory calculation and internal logic-checking circuits; they may have been shut down or running on partial power. And Luthor stumbled across a loophole, too.

"The ship has an internal schema for tracking the structure of its crew, its personnel and their assigned roles. Orders given by the individual who has been attributed the role of 'commander' are followed." Wayne's mouth twisted. "No matter how many regulations they break."

"Makes sense," Clark offered, glancing up the wall himself; and then he looked at Wayne again and almost recoiled. Wayne had—had turned on him, sudden and stone-faced, the way he was holding himself abruptly looming and the look in his eyes sharp and vicious, accusatory. "In space, I mean," Clark heard himself say, "in an emergency, or—I'm not saying I was sorry to hear Lex Luthor went to prison, Mr. Wayne—"

"No, of course not," Wayne said. He'd almost managed a conversational tone, almost leashed all that back in and tied it down again. It was stranger, Clark thought, than if he'd still looked angry, in a way, to see his face reconstruct itself into such a parody of mildness. "Of course not, Mr. Kent." He'd stopped moving, and he set his hand flat against the wall and sighed just a little through his nose. "I apologize," he added at last, very low. "It's an issue that's—close to home, you might say."

And Clark had known already that the city had had a lot of conditions it was requiring Wayne Enterprises to meet, that the company had agreed because Luthor had demonstrated the necessity behind it all. But it didn't sound like that was quite what Wayne was talking about.

"Luthor is?" he ventured.

"In more ways than you realize, Mr. Kent," Wayne said quietly. "Without this ship, its capabilities, Superman might not have been killed. And in a way it represents everything about him that made Luthor want to. His alienness, his power. The unknown. The incomprehensible." He rubbed his thumb absently across the gleaming alien metal—and it was a little bit the wrong color, Clark thought, something about it suggestive at a glance of its otherworldly origins. "Among the merits of this effort Wayne Enterprises is undertaking—and of your paper's feature, I suppose," Wayne added thoughtfully, "is that it might pull back the curtain a little. Help people understand the real Superman better."

He flashed half a smile at Clark then, looking more like himself again. Clark took a moment to review what Wayne had said in his head, and then he raised an eyebrow and said, deliberately light, "So you're going to all this trouble not just to keep maniacs from cloning alien monsters, but because it's good PR for Superman? That's very generous of you, Mr. Wayne."

"I'm not sure that's what I'd call it," Wayne said after a moment, and then turned to keep walking. "Not that it'll matter, of course, if he doesn't come back from wherever he's gone."

This he tossed back over his shoulder, offhandedly, as though he didn't care much one way or the other. Which Clark might have believed a little more readily, if it hadn't been for that look on Wayne's face when he'd talked about Luthor—

"Try to keep up, Mr. Kent. I'm not sure I mentioned—this ship does have security drones, and it would be irresponsible of me to claim I could guarantee we'd managed to deactivate them all."

"God forbid, Mr. Wayne," Clark murmured, because the entire Metropolis-Gotham metro area had a pretty good idea how Bruce Wayne regarded irresponsibility; and ahead of him Wayne tilted his head back and laughed.

And then, at last, they reached a curving doorway, unsealed, that opened into a wide round room. The viewing room, Clark had to assume, judging by the way Wayne beckoned him into it.

"Here, inside," Wayne said, and when they were standing together in the middle of it, he looked up and said, "Ship, render the view from the exterior, compensating as necessary for irregularities."

Clark looked up too, reflexive, waiting for the ship to answer—but it didn't. For a moment he thought Wayne was going to need to repeat himself, or that nothing was going to happen. And then the walls started to change.

Just a little, at first. Glinting, like it was the angle of the lighting in the room that was different—except it wasn't, it couldn't be, because the soft and apparently-sourceless illumination in the ship wasn't moving at all. And then suddenly it rippled, starting in the center of the wall in front of them and moving smoothly outward, and where the ripples had settled, it was—it was the park.

Clark stared at it as it bloomed into life across the walls, a perfect moving image: the park, the trees, the morning sunlight; figures in the distance of people walking, and of course the Superman memorial. After the first few days with no sign of him, people had started leaving flowers there again, and by now they were piling up high, spilling over, bright and colorful, beside burned-down candles left overnight and little notes, drawings made in chalk on the dark stone.

"Clark," Wayne said softly, and Clark blinked and cleared his throat, shook himself.

"Sorry, I—it's beautiful," Clark said. "It's—how is it doing this? It didn't look like a screen. The walls in here are just like the rest of the ship, aren't they?"

"They are," Wayne agreed. "Technically I think this could be done in any of the hallways we just passed through—but it looks a little more impressive in here."

Clark breathed out half a laugh, tilting his head back. The clarity was incredible; he could see the leaves on the trees moving so well it was—it was like he could hear them.

"But it's capable of more than just real-time projection," Wayne added, and then said to the ship, "Ship, Kansas. The field, please, at sunset."

And Wayne hadn't lied: the wall rippled again, the park and walkways and trees wavering like water, and suddenly a red-streaked sky was bleeding through, spreading like dye, overwriting. And instead of the park they were surrounded by a field of corn, just starting to really shoot tall, up to Clark's elbows; almost exactly the way it had looked when—

Clark squeezed his eyes shut, disoriented. He'd seen a field looking like this dozens of times, hundreds. It didn't mean anything, that he couldn't quite recall—

"Clark," Bruce said.

But that was wrong. Wasn't it? Bruce hadn't been there. Not that time. Not yet.

"Ship, the lake," he heard Wayne say, somewhere, and when he opened his eyes again it was—they were somewhere else. A lake, just like Wayne had said, cool clear water: the ship was making it look like they were standing in the middle of it, suspended just over the surface, the view stretching out over the wide still surface to the shore, where there was a gleaming house that seemed to be made of nothing but glass.

Still sunset, though, Clark thought dimly. Wayne hadn't specified a new time of day.

"Clark," Wayne repeated, and Clark blinked and met Wayne's eyes. Wayne had moved, was gripping him by the shoulder with one hand and—and the other was spread against Clark's chest, barest pressure of his fingertips tangible through Clark's shirt; as if Clark had swayed and needed steadying.

Clark swallowed. He should move away. He was—Wayne was going to think—he needed to move away. He couldn't let Wayne get the wrong idea about him, he couldn't—he should move.

He didn't do it.

"Clark," Wayne said again, more gently. "Are you okay?"

"Fine," Clark said, and then flinched a little, because somehow his voice had come out all scratched-up and hoarse, and it sounded—it made him think of things that were—

Jesus, what was wrong with him? He screwed his eyes shut again and made himself breathe, rubbing at the bridge of his nose, and Wayne was still too close, still hadn't fucking let go of him.

And then Wayne's hand moved: the one on his shoulder, skimming up quick and sure to the curve of his neck, thumb just at the hinge of his jaw. Clark heard himself make a noise that was—jesus, he wanted to rip his own throat out to make it stop, and he jerked backwards and knocked both Wayne's hands away, off him, because he couldn't stand to have them on him; he didn't know what he might do.

"Don't," he said too loudly, half a shout, "don't touch me. Don't _touch_ me. I'm not like that. I'm normal. I'm _normal_ —"

"All right," Wayne said, very even, and Clark looked at him—he had his hands raised, careful, palm-out, and he was watching Clark with those steady dark eyes—and then remembered that he hadn't wanted to, that he wasn't—he didn't want to look at Wayne right now. He didn't want to look at Wayne at all.

"I'm normal," he heard himself say again. "Do you understand? I'm—I just want to be normal. I _can't_ be like that. I can't. It's already hard enough—"

He stopped short, helplessly choked off, trapped and wordless.

"What is?" Wayne said, low, careful. "Clark, what's already hard enough?"

"I can't," Clark forced out, and then shook his head, clenching his hands into fists, feeling the strain in his knuckles. "I can't—I don't know. I don't know." He was gasping for breath like he'd just run ten miles, and _Bruce Wayne_ was standing in front of him with his hands held out defensively like Clark was going to hit him, and Clark couldn't swear he wouldn't do it if Wayne tried to touch him again. And he—

He didn't know. He _didn't know_.

"I can't remember," he heard himself say. "I don't know. I can't remember."

He squeezed his eyes shut again. God, his head hurt.

"That's okay," Wayne said. "All right? Mr. Kent. Mr. Kent," and that was—that was better, a little. Clark drew a deeper breath, let it out, and made himself look, and this time the sight of Wayne in front of him didn't make his eyes sting so much. "Mr. Kent, it's all right," Wayne repeated. "I think you should go home. Let me take you home."

Clark stood there, trembling on the cliff's edge. He should say no. But he was—he felt suddenly exhausted, wrung out. His legs, his hands, were shaking. He couldn't walk back to his apartment like this. And Wayne—Wayne probably had fifteen equally shiny cars just waiting outside, ready to go.

"Okay," he said at last. "Okay."

 

 

 

He'd been right about the shiny car. He was distantly surprised when Wayne slid into the empty driver's seat himself, but not enough to ask. He spent the drive with his eyes closed, hot forehead against the cool window, apologizing silently to whichever of Wayne's staff was going to have to swab the smear off later.

Wayne didn't seem to need directions to Clark's apartment building, which was a little creepy—but then Clark supposed his office had to have Clark's ID and personal information on file, something to check against when they issued him those credential passes to let him into the ship, so maybe it wasn't so strange after all.

And he didn't just shove Clark out of the car and speed away, though Clark couldn't have blamed him if he had. He parked so smoothly Clark hardly felt it happening—just heard Wayne's door open and close, as if from a distance, and wondered vaguely why, and then his door had opened too, and it was—Wayne was right there, holding it wide, looking down at Clark carefully, expressionless.

Clark got out; Wayne didn't reach to help him, didn't touch him, and Clark was relieved, grateful, at the same time that it made him feel small and cold and a little bit sick.

But Wayne didn't leave him then, either. He walked Clark all the way up the stairs and waited there while Clark unlocked his door, and followed Clark inside.

It occurred to Clark that he should maybe be more concerned about that than he was. But hell, it wasn't like Bruce Wayne was going to steal his stuff. And it just didn't seem to matter, compared to how badly Clark wanted to sit down and put his face in his hands and stop thinking.

So he did, and if Bruce Wayne was off short-sheeting his bed or something, that was just the price he was going to pay.

After a little while, he heard the tap come on, and then shut off again; and then a clunk. A glass, being set on the table in front of him. He looked: water.

Water, and Wayne, standing there on the other side of the table, watching Clark silently.

Clark reached for the glass, and took a sip. "Thank you," he made himself say.

And even that was—he felt his face flush, helplessly red. Jesus. After he'd flipped out at Wayne, screamed at him, and then let Wayne drive him home; saying _thanks_ seemed stupid, not half enough.

Wayne nodded, cool, and turned around. He was going to leave now, Clark thought, because there was no reason for him not to, and that was fine except for every way it wasn't.

"Wait," he said, before he could talk himself out of it. "Wait, Mr. Wayne, I—I'm sorry."

Wayne stopped and looked at him.

"I want to explain," Clark said hurriedly, and then grimaced at the way it sounded; as if Wayne were obliged to care why he'd done it. "I mean, if you—if that's all right. If you don't mind listening."

"All right," Wayne said, very level.

"It's—it's not that there's anything wrong with it," Clark fumbled, even though just saying it, edging that close to it even without naming it, was making his gut churn with queasy discomfort. "It's just not normal, that's all."

Wayne's jaw set, the muscles in his cheek knotting up fast, and shit, that hadn't sounded right at all—

"No, wait," Clark said quickly. "Wait, I just—just wait." He stopped and bit his lip, made himself take another careful swallow of water just to help his stomach settle, and tried to decide where to start.

Well—at the beginning, right?

"My parents were always worried about me, when I was a kid," Clark said slowly, staring at the table. "I remember that. They were always worried that people were going to notice me, that I would—that I was going to draw attention to myself, and get taken away." He remembered that so clearly. He—he couldn't remember _why_ , but it was—he knew it had happened. "I had to be careful. I had to be normal. That was how my dad explained it to me.

"And it was—it was everything. Everything. They didn't like it when I scored 100 too many times in a row, when I got too many As. They didn't say anything about it, but I could tell. So I didn't do it. I got Bs, I was—I was more like everybody else. I was careful. In gym class, I was never first, and I was never last. I was—I did the things everybody else did, and I—" Clark stopped, suddenly aware that he'd started talking faster, rushing, that he wasn't breathing enough, that his hands were so unsteady he'd spilled some water across the backs of his fingers. "I didn't do things they didn't do. You understand? It was Smallville, it was—it was Kansas. I didn't do things that were—unusual." He stopped again, and rubbed absently at his temple. "Except when I had to," he added, though he wasn't sure why. When would he have had to? What did that even mean?

He risked a glance at Wayne, who was still watching him steadily, face blank, as though Clark were reciting the phonebook—but he hadn't left. He was still listening.

"It isn't that there's anything wrong with it," Clark said again, helplessly. "You're—you can—you do what you want, Mr. Wayne. But I'm not like that. You're—" Jesus, what was he even trying to say? Why couldn't he get it out? He shook his head, tightened his free hand into a fist.

"Disgusting," Wayne suggested, so evenly and mildly Clark didn't even understand what he was saying at first.

And then he did, and jerked in his seat, looked up at Wayne with shocked-wide eyes and said, "No. I didn't say that—"

"Unwholesome," Wayne amended, and his tone was so so pleasant but his eyes were like ice. "Metrosexual, perhaps, if you write for the society page and you're trying to be polite about it. Indiscreet? Sordid—"

"Allowed," Clark whispered, throat aching.

Wayne went silent.

Clark squeezed his eyes shut, and set the glass very carefully down, eased his hand off it, before he could break it. "You're allowed, Mr. Wayne."

He waited there and didn't move. Surely the next thing that would happen was—was that Wayne would leave. Clark would hear him walk away, open the apartment door and close it again behind himself, and then Clark would be alone. He didn't know what he would do then. Maybe he would break the glass after all, pick it up and watch it crack in his hand; maybe he would throw it at the wall. Maybe he'd take it to the sink and wash it, and then put it in the drainer and go lie down, and once he'd eaten, slept—tomorrow, he'd feel better. That would be nice.

Except Wayne didn't move. Or he did, but not away from Clark, because suddenly a hand had settled carefully over the back of Clark's, the clenched fist he'd pressed to the table.

He opened his eyes and looked at it: Wayne's long steady fingers, broad knuckles, old pale scars scattered here and there. And then he looked up at Wayne, and swallowed.

Because Wayne's whole face had changed. Or—maybe it was mostly his eyes, the sudden softness of them; the way they were moving across Clark's face, searching, lingering; and Wayne's mouth, the gentle slanting line of it, where before it had been brittle, flat.

"I shouldn't be saying this," Wayne observed, almost conversational. "And you won't understand it. But, Clark, who you are is—after what I've seen you do, what you've done for me, everything you've given me—" He paused thoughtfully.

And then, every motion cool and deliberate, he leaned across the table, tilted Clark's chin up, and—and kissed him.

Clark couldn't think, couldn't move. He was stunned silent by it, breathless, bewildered; Wayne's mouth was—he was—they were—

Wayne broke away, after way too long—after not nearly long enough. "Falling in love with you," he said quietly, against Clark's cheek, "was the most boring, unexceptional, predictable, painfully normal thing I could possibly have done."

"Bruce," Clark said, but it was—it was already too late. Bruce had moved away, out of reach; was turning, striding toward the door; was gone.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

He'd turned the lights off and lain down, and closed his eyes. But he hadn't really expected to be able to fall asleep; this time the dream, the dim but certain knowledge that he had stumbled into another one, felt like a gift.

He was somewhere new, again, somewhere he didn't recognize. But the Clark in the dream knew where he was. He knew where he was, and he was—it meant something to him to be there, to have been let in, to—

To be allowed.

He was sitting on something, sturdy and cool and smooth: metal. A vehicle, Clark thought. A car.

Probably the awesomest car Clark had ever seen, actually. Sweet.

"This thing is sweet," the Clark in the dream said, running a hand along the line of the hood. "Did I ever apologize for that, uh, dent I put in it? Because I'm not sure I did."

"That dent _I_ put in it," Wayne corrected absently. He wasn't looking at Clark—leaning over something else, complicated mechanical parts, spread out across a worktable. He looked tired, a little stern, brow drawn down in concentration. But that Clark could tell as much meant he was relaxed, comfortable enough to allow it to be visible. The Clark in the dream was pleased about that, and self-conscious about being pleased, and frustrated by being self-conscious, never quite able to settle fully in his skin around Bruce.

But he wouldn't have traded a moment of it for the opportunity to be anywhere else. He loved being here; he loved that Bruce let him.

"I'm the one who ran into you," Wayne added, easing something into its place with a soft click.

"I landed in front of you," Clark said. "I'm not sure that was your fault."

Wayne shot him a wry glance across the worktable. "I suppose you want to call that one even, too," he murmured.

Clark grinned at him, sunny. "I'm just saying."

He lay back across the hood of the car. The Batmobile, the Clark in the dream knew.

(—because Bruce was—who? Clark almost had it, almost understood—)

He clasped his hands behind his head and gazed up at the ceiling, the transition from bare dug-out rock to concrete, and listened to the quiet metallic sounds of Wayne working. And he thought about that night, the car striking him, how weirdly satisfying it had been to stand there and let Bruce hit him with all he had and just bounce off; he knew now exactly how much Bruce would have hated that, that it had only made everything worse.

Jesus. Sometimes it seemed impossible, that after all of that he and Bruce had still managed to get this far: in the Cave together, mission done and dusted and nowhere to be, just because they felt like it. Just because Clark hadn't wanted to leave, and Bruce hadn't made him.

"Why did you bring me back?" the Clark in the dream said quietly.

The sounds of Wayne working stopped; and then, after a long silent moment, resumed. "You know why."

Clark closed his eyes. "So if it hadn't been for Steppenwolf," he said, "you'd have left me down there."

He didn't even know what he wanted Bruce to say. Yes—yes, he'd have left Clark to his rest, undisturbed; or no, that he—that he'd _wanted_ Clark back, even a little bit, even without having a reason to—

Stupid. Bruce didn't do things without a reason.

Except when Wayne spoke, that wasn't what he said. "I don't know."

Clark twisted on the Batmobile's hood, surprised, looking over. "I thought you must have been relieved, when it happened. That your problems had solved each other like that. At least until you realized you needed me again—"

He stopped, then, because something was happening to Bruce's face that was—he didn't understand it, watching the way Bruce's brow furrowed, the way he swallowed, the flat line his mouth was making, pieces of a puzzle that wouldn't quite fit together into a whole picture.

"No," Bruce said shortly. "You died to save the world. You shouldn't have had to. I wasn't—relieved."

He'd stopped what he was doing again, hands still. Clark could hear him breathing, steady but—but a little shallow, maybe.

"It wasn't right," he added, after a moment. "I didn't want to leave it like that. The first excuse I had, the first thing to try that I thought might work—I took it. I did it." He kept his eyes down a little longer, and then finally looked up at Clark, just for a second. "I'm not very patient."

And the Clark in the dream thought about all the ways that wasn't true: Bruce waiting, watching, for a year and a half after Black Zero, without giving himself away; Bruce crouching in the dark for hours, all night, until precisely the right moment arrived. And then about everything it might mean, that Bruce would say that anyway about this—about Clark.

"Right," he heard himself say, through a suddenly dry throat. "And you—didn't not like me."

He glanced at Bruce, and this time Bruce was already looking back; their eyes met, and Bruce's were intent, dark, knocking all the breath out of Clark's chest at once. He felt his face heating, his tongue thick and clumsy in his mouth, like he suddenly had no idea what to do with his body.

"Not that we knew each other very well, then," he managed.

"No," Bruce agreed, looking away. "But now that we do—"

"What?" Clark said, when he didn't finish.

And Bruce glanced at him and then smiled a little, wry and slanting. "I don't like you less," he murmured, deliberately light.

It was—he was kidding. Clark should laugh. But he was just staring instead, helpless, heart hammering; Bruce like this, in the Cave, surrounded by everything he'd made and built and put together, everything he'd forged himself into, looking at Clark like that and smiling—jesus. It was too much, it wasn't enough, he was—

He was going to do something he couldn't take back if he didn't get the hell out of here.

"Thank you," he made himself say, after way too long. And he shouldn't have done it, but with the speed—maybe Bruce couldn't even tell. For him it had to be a microsecond, a picosecond; he probably couldn't even feel Clark's hand settling over the back of his on the worktable, before Clark tore himself away and took off, leaving the cool air swirling in his wake.

 

 

 

The dream didn't go on much longer. Clark flew, and flew, and flew.

(You could fly in dreams sometimes. It didn't have to mean anything—)

He flew until the air was thin around him, the sky impossibly black and the stars gleaming bright and steady, not enough atmosphere left to make them twinkle. He didn't breathe, because he didn't have to, and up there, it was—he was nobody.

He was nobody, for a little while. No one was looking. He didn't have to be anything.

And it was okay that he was afraid, it was okay that he didn't know what to do, because for a little while it didn't matter; and it was so, so quiet.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Bruce left the apartment. He walked back down the stairs, easy, taking them one at a time. There was no reason to draw attention by rushing. He went out to the car and got back into it.

And then he found himself looking, helpless, at the passenger seat: the empty space Clark Kent had left behind him.

Bruce had never been any good at tolerating absences with that particular quality.

( _Like I was dead for a little too long_ , Clark had said to him once, _and everything figured out how to work around the gap_ , and it would have been entirely the wrong reaction at the time, but oh, how Bruce had longed to tell him exactly how mistaken he was.)

At least Clark wasn't dead this time. Not that Bruce's conduct had been any less error-ridden. Thoughtless, idiotic, selfish—as if Clark hadn't already had reason enough to refuse to enter any room Bruce was in, Bruce had just handed him an undeniably compelling excuse to insist on it, and get a restraining order besides—

But sitting here thinking about it changed nothing. Bruce made himself reach for the steering wheel and look out instead of sideways, and he drove.

Lucky, that Bruce Wayne had associated himself with the Justice League, in turning the Hall and its grounds over to them as a donation. He could go straight there, without having to pause or change clothes or switch cars.

He'd already pressed the combination of dashboard controls that would signal the rest of them, and by the time he arrived, Diana and Victor and Arthur were already there waiting for him, Barry blitzing in a moment later in a scattering of fractured white light with his mouth still half-full of whatever he'd been eating.

"Hi, yes, what's up? Is it Clark? Did you solve it?"

"I have a working hypothesis," Bruce said evenly. "Do you all remember the mission we undertook two weeks ago—the miracle machine?"

"That thing from the future?" Barry said. "Sure, yeah. That weird guy who looked like a bug opened a portal over the table in here and told us to find it, we did, we wished it back to—" He waved a hand. "—the year 3000 or whatever. What does that have to do with Clark?"

But Victor was already leaning forward, intent. "You think someone got to it before we managed to send it back to the Legion of Super-Heroes," he said. "You think Superman got wished away."

Bruce paused. It was essentially correct, and he had no reason to make assumptions regarding precisely whose wish it had been. The miracle machine didn't leave evidence; that was part of what made it so dangerous. It simply—reshaped, altering reality in a single gestalt transformation.

The portal opening had startled all of them, and precious seconds had been wasted trying to understand what they were seeing; portals through time were difficult to open and even more difficult to maintain, and the future Legion of Super-Heroes hadn't been able to do much more than convey the essential nature of the miracle machine, that it had been stolen, the precise time and location it must be wished back to, before the crack they'd made in space-time had inexorably closed again.

And, impossible though it had all sounded, it had turned out to be entirely accurate. It had taken them much less time to locate the machine than Bruce had expected—the thief had been barely competent, stowing it close enough to the waterfront that half the idle wishes of people wandering along the boardwalk had started coming to life; all it had taken was one kid with a dinosaur obsession and it hadn't exactly been difficult to narrow things down to a one-mile radius. The upside was that it had also been an easy fix. The miracle machine was precisely that: a machine. Not malicious, not benevolent. It did exactly what you asked it to do, exactly the way you asked it, and as long as you were careful, you could set things to rights as quickly as anybody could break them.

It had been nice to have that be true for once.

But it wasn't implausible that someone quick-thinking might have managed to get close enough to make a wish they hadn't noticed at the time. It was just—

It was just something about Clark. About the way he'd said it, harsh, desperate: _I just want to be normal_.

"No," Diana said slowly, and Bruce met her eyes and forced himself not to look away. "No, he doesn't," and then to Bruce, "You think he did it. You think he did it to himself." She paused. "At this time of day—you should still be with him at the ship. Bruce, what happened?"

"He told me something," Bruce said, which conveniently was both a ludicrous understatement and completely true. "He was the one who reached the miracle machine and wished it back. And I think when he did it, he wished something else, too. He wished to be normal."

And Christ, he might not even have known he was doing it. He'd been trying for so long, that thought always lurking in the back of his head, always just a little out of reach; the background radiation of Clark Kent's life, so familiar and relentless as to be invisible, unnoticed. Until he was standing next to a wish-granting cosmos-altering machine from the future.

"Well, shit," Arthur said.

"But he didn't do it right," Barry said. "Right? He couldn't have. Because, I mean—he didn't rewrite himself, not really. Superman existed, we all still remember him; everybody's been talking about him going missing. He hardly changed anything."

"Because it was too simple," Victor said. He looked at Bruce. "If it was just that thought, exactly like that—I wish I were normal—the miracle machine reads minds, but its comprehension isn't perfect. For a Kryptonian on a world with a yellow sun, speaking literally, Clark _is_ normal."

And suddenly, Bruce understood. The way Clark had panicked, the way he'd remembered that he couldn't remember—the way he'd touched his head afterward, in the ship and then again at his apartment. "The wish isn't stable," he said aloud. "He wasn't specific enough to make it work. He didn't wish his powers away—"

—because even if he could have, even if it had occurred to him, he wouldn't have done it; he cared too much about being able to help people—

"—but he must have gotten some of the context across. That he wanted to be ordinary, unremarkable. He had to forget," and Christ, Bruce had been right: it was a trap. Even the machine had known it. "If he knew he had powers, he'd use them. He'd be Superman. He _had_ to forget."

"Except he can't," Arthur said.

Bruce raised an eyebrow.

Arthur raised one right back. "He can't forget them," he repeated. "Not for long. If he's still got them—sooner or later something's going to happen. An accident, and he won't have a scratch on him. Somebody getting hurt, and nobody human could stop it but he's going to do something dumb anyway just because he has to try. You know he will."

Bruce didn't answer. But all that meant was that he couldn't argue, and Arthur knew it.

"We must not let that happen," Diana said, firm. "If what remains of the wish continues to crumble—what if he remembers only pieces at a time? If one moment there is nothing, and the next he remembers killing General Zod, or dying, or fighting us all in the park—" She shook her head, expression grave, and Bruce let his eyes fall shut because he knew what she was going to say next. "He should be told. He should know what is happening to him, and he shouldn't go through it alone."

Bruce spread his hands flat against the surface of the table, opened his eyes and stared down at them. "We arranged for the entire week," he said. "He'll be meeting me in the park again tomorrow. I can start then."

Unless Clark had already decided to stay as far away from Bruce Wayne as he could get; unless Bruce had already fucked this up with his own reckless need to make a point, in a way no mother box or genesis chamber could repair. But there was nothing he could do except try.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Clark had no idea what to do.

On the one hand—in the cold light of day, doing his best to be rational about it, it was obvious that no matter what else might or might not be going on with Bruce Wayne, the man was a complete nutjob. In _love_ , jesus. _After what I've seen you do, everything you've given me_. What the hell could he possibly have been talking about? It made no sense, it was—just because there was something going on with Clark too, things Clark couldn't remember, gaps in his own head he couldn't cross, that didn't mean Wayne wasn't out of his mind. Surely if they were—if they'd been—how could Clark have forgotten that? It couldn't be possible.

Except—

He squeezed his eyes shut and let his head drop back against the wall of the elevator, even though it was probably going to make the woman headed for the fourth floor give him a funny look. How _was_ there an "except"? Jesus, he was just as nuts as Wayne. He was having some kind of nervous breakdown or something, and Bruce Wayne was a psycho who liked to play mind games with innocent reporters, and all Clark had to do was steer clear of him. Except—

Except.

Clark bit his lip, eyes still closed, and listened to the elevator ding, the poor lady who'd been stuck sharing it with him finally able to hustle off in relief. There was just—there was something about Wayne. Something stubborn, dug deep, hooked so far inside Clark that even when he knew better, he still—he still did things like play Wayne's lopsided version of twenty questions, or follow Wayne places neither of them were supposed to go, or let Wayne drive him home.

He still did things like sit there at his own kitchen table and let Wayne kiss him.

It should have bothered him. Not—it wasn't disgusting, he didn't—Wayne had been wrong about that. But he wasn't—he shouldn't have wanted it. And instead—

Instead, he'd gone still. He'd been startled, bewildered. Amazed. Hearing Wayne murmur _falling in love with you_ like that; as if it were unassailable truth and not the most impossibly wonderful thing Clark had ever heard—but how could it be? He'd been transfixed, astounded, and that made no sense. He had—he'd wanted to—

He pressed a thumb against his temple. God, his head hurt.

The elevator dinged again, and Clark blinked and looked up and had to hurry out before the doors could close on him.

He was trying to at least pretend there was a chance he wasn't going to rush right off to see Wayne again. He'd figured it all out: he'd come by the office, answer some emails, review his notes. After yesterday, he was pretty sure Wayne wouldn't pitch a fit over Clark being a little late to meet him at the ship. He could—they would—he'd remind himself that this was a job, that he was going to see Wayne because he had work to get done. He'd apologize for everything, for coming apart like that at Wayne and for—for the apartment after, and he wouldn't bring up what Wayne had said if Wayne didn't. He'd—

He'd be normal.

But instead he walked in and Lois was waiting for him. And that was ordinary, there wasn't anything weird about that; but somehow today, with a tight ache still lingering around his temples, at the back of his neck, remembering his own voice saying _I can't remember_ —he slowed as he came closer to her, and then stopped.

"How did we—how did we meet?"

It was a stupid question, and a weird one coming out of nowhere like that, but Lois didn't look startled to hear it. "What do you remember?" she said gently.

Clark rubbed his forehead. "I helped you out of a helicopter," he said. "And then you were—you looked for me." Why had she done it? He didn't know. He should have, but he didn't. He couldn't think of it, couldn't drag the answer loose.

He hesitated. Jesus, this was ridiculous. He didn't have any reason to ask, any reason to think there was some kind of secret answer—nothing but his own stupid preoccupation, the strange things Wayne had said. But—

"Lois, do I—how well do I know Bruce Wayne?"

And instead of telling him he'd lost his mind, Lois looked at him carefully for a long stretched-out moment, and then smiled, reaching out to squeeze his arm. "That's a great question, Smallville," she said. "But I'm not the person you should be asking. You know that."

Clark blew out a breath, and scrubbed a hand across his face. "Yeah," he said. "I do. Thanks, Lo," he added, and leaned in and kissed her cheek; and she hugged him close for a second and then let go, and gave him a little push for good measure.

"Go on, go on—get the story already," she said with a laugh. "You're a reporter, aren't you?"

"Yeah, I am," Clark said, and went.

 

 

 

He left—everything, didn't touch his desk, his notes; he didn't need them. He took the long familiar walk from the Planet office to the park at half a run, and he didn't even know why he was in such a hurry but he couldn't talk himself into slowing down. He needed to know. He _wanted_ to. And somehow whatever it was that was gone, whatever was missing, Bruce Wayne had it; Bruce Wayne was the one who could tell him what it was.

There was something that felt almost dangerous about it. Or at least that was the best word Clark had for it that seemed to explain the thump of his heart, the helpless prickle of his skin—the way he felt when Wayne came into view, waiting there by the ship, hands in his pockets; when Wayne looked up and their eyes met, and suddenly Clark almost couldn't breathe. It was electric, relentless. And jesus, Clark couldn't help thinking, there was nothing normal about any of this—but knowing that wasn't enough to make him turn around and walk away.

And Wayne didn't walk away either. He saw Clark coming, he had plenty of time to; but he didn't move. He waited there, perfectly still, like stone—except not stone at all, the furthest thing from it, because he was watching Clark walk toward him and his eyes were—

"Bruce," Clark said quietly, and stopped a stride away.

"Mr. Kent," Bruce said, and Clark was already shaking his head.

"No. That's not what you call me. Is it? Bruce—I've forgotten something." Clark came a half-step closer. "I've forgotten something," he said again, more firmly, because it was ridiculous and stupid and made no sense, but Bruce hadn't told him that it was—Bruce didn't look confused, or tell Clark that was nonsense, or ask him what he was high on. "I've forgotten something important, and you know what it is. You—" He swallowed hard, face hot, and he didn't even know why it scared him when Bruce was the one who'd said it. "You said you'd fallen in love with me, that I wouldn't understand. And I don't." He stopped and shook his head, reached up to rub the side of his hand along the sudden bright throb crossing his forehead. "I don't, but I want to. Please—tell me. You have to tell me."

Bruce stood there silently for so long Clark thought he was about to say no. And then he looked away, toward the ship, and said evenly, "I thought about this."

So he—there really was something. Clark wasn't sure whether the sudden dizzy rush he felt was relief or terror. There really was something, and Bruce was about to tell him what, and once he knew he couldn't unknow it; even if he never remembered it for himself, even if whatever was gone didn't come back. He almost wanted to put his hand over Bruce's mouth, to cover his ears, at the same time that he was so desperate he could hardly stand it.

"I thought about what I would do if you asked," Bruce had continued. "What to say. Where to start. How to try to explain." He ground to a halt, and shook his head. "Christ, I should have made Alfred do this," Clark heard him mutter.

Clark waited for him to look up again, and then shrugged one shoulder. "At the beginning," he said, and gave Bruce a wry little smile. "That usually works, in my experience." Or at least it had at the apartment, sort of. Even if everything else about yesterday had been kind of a disaster. "Hit the highlights. Don't bury the lede."

Bruce huffed out something that was almost a laugh at that, though Clark wasn't quite sure why; and then his mouth went flat, his face grave, and he said, "All right. We hated each other."

Clark blinked.

"We hated each other," Bruce repeated. "We had every reason to, or at least all the ones we needed. We fought. You died—not me, someone else. You died and I watched, and I couldn't bear it, and I brought you back from the dead."

And for a second, Clark just heard it and believed it. For a second, it didn't even occur to him to ask how. It seemed suddenly intuitively plausible, exactly the way Bruce had said it: that Bruce had just _decided_ , had looked at Clark with eyes like that and willed it, and Clark had come to life.

They stood there staring at each other, Clark trying frantically to—jesus, to even just figure out what to ask next; who he had been, why it had happened. And then, as though the universe was well aware he was about to actually get a goddamn answer, the silence that had settled around them abruptly cracked apart.

Clark flinched at the first—what the hell was that? A _gunshot_? He twisted around, trying to guess where it had come from, and there were two more, four, a dozen, rattling out across the park—

A grip on his shoulder. Bruce, Clark thought, and in the time it took him to think it Bruce had already shoved him sideways, pushed him down behind one of the concrete barriers that marked out the secure perimeter around the ship. "Keep your head _down_ ," Bruce was growling in his ear, and it was absolutely the thing Clark should have wanted most to do when somebody was shooting at them, but instead he mostly felt like arguing.

"I can help you," Clark protested, not sure why he was so sure. "I—can't I?" But he could; if they'd been enemies, if they'd fought but Bruce hadn't been the one to kill him, then he was—he'd survived. He'd gone up against Bruce and he'd survived. He had to be pretty decent. Right? Why was that impressive? When had Bruce Wayne ever gone toe-to-toe with anybody, except maybe in bar fights when he was young and stupid—

"Head down," Bruce gritted out. "You stay low and you stay out of it. Understand?" and Clark did and didn't at the same time, wanted to push back but Bruce was already moving away, crouched, sliding his suit jacket down his arms and leaving it on the ground behind him like he was going to—like he was—

Suit jacket. But he didn't have his suit, Clark thought hazily. Bruce didn't have his suit with him, and Clark pressed his aching head to the cool concrete in front of him and almost understood what that meant. He almost had it—he almost—

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

—had it, just a little further.

He sped up in the air, starting to blur. The rest of the League was managing to hold a decent perimeter, and Bruce had been right: all he needed to do was get to the machine. Once he had it, he could pick it up, carry it into the air with him and get it out of range of everybody but himself. He'd be the only one it could hear, then. No interference, no competing wishes, and he could send it back where it belonged.

He dodged around two palm trees that shouldn't have been there and then dropped low and landed in sand—somebody's half-made wish for a real beach, probably. The waterfront warehouse where the machine was had already been torn open by a T. rex, before Barry had zipped close enough to the machine to wish the dinosaurs safely away again; Clark had heard him shout, "You'll like the Cretaceous a lot better, my dudes!"

He picked up a little more speed and whipped through the ragged gap, felt cool metal against his fingers and closed his hands around it. The machine was big; but Clark just wished it unbreakable and kept moving, secure in the knowledge that he could lift it and its own weight wouldn't snap whatever part he had in his hands.

And then he went straight up through the warehouse roof and kept going. Up, up, and just a little further would have him higher than most commercial flights, so he wouldn't have to worry about some passing jetline passenger idly wishing themselves back onto the ground.

He slowed a little, breathed in the cool clear air up here and then hefted the machine around in his grip and stared at it. One quick clean-up wish to take care of those palm trees, and he was ready. He'd memorized the instructions the Legion of Super-Heroes had given them—they all had, because they hadn't been sure which of them might have to make the wish in the end.

And it had to be the only thing he was thinking of. He took another deep breath and made himself think of Mom: not missing her, just remembering. An island, out in the ocean. Nothing else. An island.

Because the thing about the miracle machine was, it only took an instant to work. And it could do anything. It could rewrite all creation, in the blink of an eye.

(It could make everything easier. It wouldn't even take much. It could make him—)

He hung there among the sunlit clouds, alone, and he wished.

And when he opened his eyes again, the machine was gone.

So it had worked. He'd done it right, sent it back, and the Legion would be there waiting for it to turn it off and lock it away again in their vault. He looked down at himself, at the Superman uniform, and it was—everything was the same. So he must have done it right.

He must not have let any other wishes slip out, and that was for the best.

It had to be for the best.

That was what the Clark in the dream thought—

The Clark in the memory. That was what the Clark in the memory thought. And he'd gone back down to rejoin the rest of the League, let them know the machine was gone. They'd debriefed, and Clark had gone back to his apartment alone and closed his eyes, and forgotten.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Bruce kept himself low, sheltered, as he rounded the ship, sneaking assessing glances over the secure perimeter whenever there was a break in the shooting. He'd counted twelve hostiles so far, but he needed to know how they were making their approach, whether another twelve were closing on the far side of the ship in a pincer or these dozen-odd were simply attempting a direct assault.

They were wearing black—of course—and nothing about them was readily identifiable, but Bruce was comfortable pinning the odds on Luthor. Yes, any number of people were likely to be interested in the ship, its contents, especially now that Wayne Enterprises had staked a claim to it and locked it down; but no one else had demonstrated such a persistent obsession with it.

And Superman had been gone for long enough that even in prison, Luthor had probably heard about it. What better opportunity could he ask for? To take advantage of Superman's absence, and no doubt he'd jump on the chance to taunt Clark later for—for abandoning his worshippers, turning his back on them, however temporarily, like the cold and unmerciful god Luthor already believed him to be.

Yes, that sounded like Luthor.

But Bruce's priority couldn't be neutralization, however tempting the prospect. There were a lot of them; he was effectively operating solo; and he had a pitiable minimum of equipment on his person, though if he were a little closer to the car he could have leveled the playing field in moments—

But never mind. One of the few things he _did_ have was the silent signal to alert the League, which he'd activated several minutes ago. All he needed to do was hold his ground, prevent them from reaching the ship, eat up time, and the League would arrive.

At least he didn't have to worry about any of them shooting Clark. Clark might not remember any of the hours and hours of combat and tactical work they'd done, might not remember how many powers he had or how to use them; but being bulletproof, thankfully, required no effort on Clark's part whatsoever. Clark Kent couldn't help Bruce, not with this, but he also couldn't get hurt.

Three more, six more—there were at least another dozen of them after all. Bruce gritted his teeth and ducked again, bullets ringing off the concrete. Whoever on the WE team had decided to use these barriers for the interior perimeter, they were getting a raise.

Part of the second team had come close enough now that he could hear voices, low orders. The fence that formed the outer perimeter—but were they going to climb over it, or cut through it? The clatter of metal wasn't diagnostic; but then Bruce heard a grunt, a distinct snap. Had to be wire cutters.

Good.

He waited until one of them, two of them, had come through, and had turned to pull the wire aside for the others—with their backs to him, it was almost too easy. He concentrated on disabling strikes, on quickness, keeping his head down and his face blocked as much as possible; thought if they were working for Luthor, it mattered less than usual, because Luthor already knew perfectly well what he was capable of.

They couldn't come at him through the gap in the fence except in ones and twos—it was a perfect choke point. He found himself almost smiling as he went, the satisfying systematic work of it. Good exercise.

And then he heard a sound he couldn't immediately identify. A hum, the soft steady sound of some kind of equipment being warmed up or readied. He turned to look for it, whatever it might be; and he made it about halfway before he was—stopped.

Stopped, utterly. He couldn't move, he couldn't _breathe_. The air was full of light, a field of glittering motes, suspended—coming out of the device that one of them had pointed at Bruce and turned on.

And Bruce had seen light that hung that way before. Just how much time had Luthor been able to spend rooting around in the ship before his grand finale, anyway? Obviously the answer was too much, if he'd had the opportunity to develop some kind of stasis gun out of whatever he'd found. And Bruce had about two minutes to get out of it, until being so thoroughly immobilized that he couldn't inhale became a more serious problem than he could handle.

Christ, he couldn't even move his eyes. He could hear—he thought he could, at least; the field had to be external, enclosing him like a plaster cast, preventing him from altering position in any way but nothing more. Otherwise all his blood would have stopped moving, the signals in his brain halted—he wouldn't even have been able to think. And apparently it didn't extend deep enough into his ear canals to have stilled his eardrums, because yes, that was a sound. One of them moving toward him, though it was unbearably frustrating not to be able to look over.

"Jesus, what a fucking pain in the ass," the man said. "Come on, Beauman, shoot him in the head and then shut that thing off. That noise gives me a headache."

And of course they weren't going to be stupid enough to reach into the field trying to press a gun to his head. From a distance—what could he do?

Nothing, he thought. Hopefully Clark was still back on the other side of the ship where Bruce had left him. The League couldn't be more than a minute away; maybe one of them would find his body first, and not Clark.

He couldn't even close his eyes while he waited for it. The sound of someone racking a slide seemed to come with painful slowness.

And then all at once there was a crash, the screeching noise of crumpling metal, and Bruce was released so suddenly he nearly fell, the field of light extinguished. He twisted even as he sucked in a desperate breath, struck out wildly and hit the mouth of the gun that had been pointed at his head, and a moment later it was on the ground, its former owner groaning beside it, and the rest of them were—

The rest of them were gone, down, on the ground—the last one was still skidding to a stop, gun bent in half and rattling away past him.

And Clark was in the middle of them, picking up what was left of the stasis gun and jamming his hand almost thoughtfully into its sparking crackling power source, watching a rush of jagged red lightning spill up his arm without seeming to feel it before the whole device went black.

He let it drop to the ground, and then looked up. "Bruce," he said.

Bruce's chest felt tight—but then he still hadn't quite caught his breath. "You remember."

"Yeah," Clark said, "I do," and then they both looked up in time to watch the Flying Fox come in low over the park, grass rippling beneath it.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

It was nice to be back.

Clark accepted Barry's earnest congratulations, Diana's brilliant smile, Arthur's companionable clasp of the arm, Victor's friendly slap on the shoulder. Of course he couldn't go with them then, not in the Fox—he was still Clark Kent, the suit not on him or even with him but all the way back in the apartment, tucked away where he'd put it the last time he'd taken it off.

"Okay, okay, all right," Barry said, "but you better come by later, seriously. If we let you leave now and you get new amnesia and ghost us _again_ , you're in big trouble, dude. Big trouble."

Clark grinned sheepishly and rubbed the back of his neck, and waved them off, and Bruce was—

Bruce was already gone.

Which was fine, Clark decided, standing there watching the Fox take off. Because Clark remembered everything; he knew where to find Bruce, knew where he would go, and when Clark followed, Bruce would let him in.

Probably.

Clark didn't rush it. He went back to the Planet to let Lois know he was okay, which earned him a laugh and a hug and a kiss on the cheek. And then he did go through his notes, double-checking—but Bruce actually mostly had told Clark Kent the truth about the ship, even if he'd fudged the details a little.

God, that must have been strange for him. Explaining things he'd figured out while Clark was dead, or things Clark had told him and shown him after—which had been worse?—to Clark himself, while Clark nodded along attentively.

But probably not as strange as telling a Clark who didn't even remember— _anything_ , jesus, none of the stuff that was important, none of the stuff that meant anything, that he was—that he—

Just like Bruce, in a way, to say it when he knew for a fact Clark wouldn't be able to say it back. To leave it up to Clark to decide whether to mention it again, whether to make anything out of it, or—

Or, Clark thought wryly, to just forget about it.

But if that was what Bruce had been banking on, he was out of luck. Because Clark had kind of had enough of forgetting about things for a while.

 

 

 

So when Clark went to the Hall that evening, he didn't go to the main room, and he didn't go to the lounge, and he didn't go to the equipment room.

He went straight to the monitor room upstairs, instead, and when he touched down against the floor, letting the soles of his shoes settle audibly, he could see Bruce's shoulders get just a little bit straighter.

"Clark," Bruce said.

"Hey," Clark said, and then made a face at himself. Jesus. "Bruce—I'm glad you're okay."

"Of course," Bruce said easily, and turned in his chair to offer Clark a placid, pleasant little smile. "Thanks for the assist."

Clark just watched him for a second, marveling a little; he didn't think he could have managed that conversational tone in a million years, if their positions had been reversed. "That's not what I want to talk to you about," he said at last, and Bruce's face shuttered itself neatly to blankness.

Bruce looked back at the bank of monitors in front of him. "If you'd like a little time away from your League duties, it shouldn't be a problem. I think we've proven that we're capable of functioning without you in the short term, even if—"

"What?" Clark said, thrown. "No, Bruce. I don't need time away—"

"The pressure of being on-call the way we are," Bruce told the desk, "twenty-four-seven, is intense. We all needed time to adjust."

Clark stared at his back. "You figured it out," he heard himself say. "You know what I wished for."

"Approximately," Bruce said quietly. "It's understandable. You've been through a lot; being Superman is difficult. And I believe I speak for the entire League in saying that you shouldn't have to accidentally lobotomize yourself with advanced technology from the thirtieth century to—" He paused; one of his hands was braced around the edge of the desk, and his knuckles had gone pale. "To be normal for a little while," he said at last.

And Clark didn't know where the hunch came from, but it was there and he couldn't ignore it. "You think I was better off," he said. "You think I was happier."

Bruce stayed like that for a second; and then he turned, finally, swiveled in the chair and met Clark's eyes. "Weren't you?" he said, very softly.

"Wasn't I— _no_ ," Clark said. "I mean, I have no idea. I—maybe that guy had less to worry about. Maybe he didn't end up in quite as many wildly dangerous situations. But that doesn't mean he was happy. You were—" He swallowed, and there was that awful terrified heat, just like always, rising into his face. "You saw. There were other things he was frightened of. He was—he was at least as screwed up as I am."

Bruce's brow furrowed, just a little. "You—don't think of him as being you," he said, not quite a question.

"I don't see how he could have been," Clark said, and then, throat aching, before he could second-guess it or stop himself, "Not when he couldn't remember you."

Bruce went still in his chair.

Clark closed his eyes; he couldn't do this looking at Bruce, he didn't think, trying to pick out every little twitch in Bruce's face and figure out what it meant. He had to just say it. "I didn't mean to wish myself out of the League. That isn't actually something I want. Or—or my biological parents, not being able to remember them. I wasn't trying to do that.

"And I didn't mean to wish myself out of knowing you. I don't think I was happier that way. I think—I think maybe it just made things a little simpler for a while, that's all. I didn't mean to make that wish, but I was—everything felt so complicated. I wanted it all to be simpler.

"You, this—" Clark gestured between them, feeling clumsy, helpless. Jesus, they were never going to get anywhere if he couldn't _say_ it; it was just so hard to do, all tangled up, a lifetime's carefully-ingrained habit. _Don't make a production out of yourself. Don't draw attention. Be like other people. Be normal._

But Bruce had said it. Bruce had kissed him, and said it, and meant it, put himself on the line in a way Clark would never have expected him to do, and—

And he'd told Clark it _was_ normal. After everything they'd been through, done to and for each other and forgiven each other for doing to them, the way they'd gotten to know each other a bit at a time, the way Clark felt when he looked at Bruce—maybe Bruce was right. Maybe falling in love with Bruce, in its own way, was one of the most ordinary things Clark had ever done.

"Being in love with you," he scraped out, hardly more than a whisper, "isn't simple. But that doesn't mean I want it to stop. It's _me_ , it's important to me. I don't want it to go away and I don't want to give it up."

He forced himself to open his eyes, to look—and Bruce was staring at him, dark-eyed, heartstoppingly intent. Clark felt as if it was somebody else who had the sense to move a half-step closer, as if he wasn't doing it at all, too busy drinking in Bruce's face.

"I don't think it was ever going to be simple for us," he said. "I don't think it could have been. The way it all happened, the things we had to do to make it this far. It was never going to be simple. Just like you said—we hated each other, we had every reason we needed. Getting from there to here, meeting in the middle, it was hard. But I wouldn't give it up for anything."

"Clark," Bruce said, very low; and he came up out of the chair, one quick deliberate motion, and caught Clark's face in his hand. "Clark, you don't have to. You won't ever have to," and Clark couldn't stand to have even the smallest distance between them anymore—he put his arm around Bruce and tugged him in, kissed him at last. And even after everything, the ship, the things Bruce had said, it still felt like an impossible gift that Bruce would let him do it.

Let him do it—and then lean into him like this, make such a soft hungry sound against his mouth. As if he loved it, as if he had no intention of stopping. Clark squeezed his eyes shut and held on, clutching Bruce's shoulders, and jesus, he thought dimly, screw miracle machines; there was nothing in the universe that was ever going to be able to make him forget this.

 

 


End file.
